Salt Dialects

The tide arrives speaking in a dialect no one transcribes — consonants of gravel drawn back across themselves, the vowels left shining in shallow pools.

My grandmother kept jars of sea glass on a windowsill that faced the harbor. She said each piece had swallowed a word some sailor threw overboard, and the ocean wore it smooth enough to hold.

I have been trying to learn the grammar of salt, how it clings to iron and changes it completely, how it enters a wound the way a question enters a conversation — suddenly relevant.

There is a frequency below hearing where the waves rehearse their arguments. I press my ear to the wet sand and catch only the pauses, which may be the more honest parts.

Tonight the water pulls its dark sheet over the ledger of the shore. Whatever was written there — footprints, the stitchwork of sanderlings — the salt will translate it by morning into glass.