Salt Dialects

The tide has a grammar no one transcribes, each wave a dependent clause folding into the sentence before it, the period never arriving.

I stood where the jetty fractures into rust and listened for the verb — the one that means both to erode and to keep, the way salt preserves what it dissolves.

My grandmother spoke a dialect that thinned with every generation, her consonants hard as barnacles, her vowels the color of estuary light at the moment before the lamps come on.

Now I return to shorelines the way I return to half-remembered words, tasting the difference between what the mouth knows and what the mind has catalogued.

Somewhere beneath the surface a current still carries the old inflections, and the sea repeats its one lesson: that nothing unspoken is truly lost, only translated into foam.