Salt Dialect

The tide returns with its one syllable, pressing the shore into a thinner page. I have stood here long enough to learn the salt dialect — how water says the same thing and means it differently each time.

Kelp ropes braid and unbraid in the current's slow cursive. A cormorant drops like a black comma into a sentence the waves keep revising, surfacing with a flash of silver argument.

My grandmother spoke this way, circling back to the same harbor of a story, each telling worn smoother, the details rounded as sea glass — green, then white, then nearly invisible.

What the ocean teaches is not patience but the usefulness of repetition: how a cliff becomes a beach, how a name said often enough becomes indistinguishable from love.