Salt Dialects

The tide has a grammar no one transcribes, each wave a clause folding into the next, leaving its punctuation in foam and wrack.

I stood where the breakwater stutters against the harbor mouth, listening for the sentence that never completes itself, the one my grandmother spoke in sleep.

She kept jars of sea glass on the sill— green, amber, the blue of lost medicine bottles— and called them the ocean's marginal notes, things it meant to say but smoothed away.

Now the shore returns her dialect to me in fragments: a shell's hollow vowel, the consonant click of stones rearranging, salt air pressed against the back of my teeth.

I am learning to read what the water revises, how every erasure is itself a kind of text, how the blankest stretch of sand still holds the impression of a wave.