Salt Dialects

The tidepools keep their own grammar, each anemone a closed vowel opening only when the water returns to press its cold syllable against the rock.

I have walked this coastline long enough to know the difference between retreat and the slow accumulation of absence— how a cliff learns to let go of itself one consonant at a time.

There is a dialect the salt speaks to the iron in old hulls, a patience that translates everything into the color of rust.

The fishermen mend nets at dawn, their hands fluent in a weave no alphabet has claimed. They do not call it knowledge. They call it Thursday.

And the sea, which has no use for names, goes on pronouncing the shore in a language that wears down everything it touches into sand.