Salt Dialect

The tide has a grammar no one taught it— subject, verb, the long erosion of return. Each wave a sentence started and abandoned, foam punctuating the dark basalt.

I stood where the jetty splits the current and listened for the clause that holds. Kelp ropes dragged their cursive across the shallow ledger of the sand.

My grandmother spoke a dialect that thinned with every winter. Words for specific kinds of rain, for the silence after a door closes, for bread left out too long.

The ocean has those words. It mutters them against the pilings, files them in the crevices of barnacles, repeats them with the patience of someone who will never be understood.

I press my ear to the wet stone and almost catch the inflection— a vowel shaped like an estuary, a consonant that tastes of iron and kelp. The lesson continues without me.