Salt Dialect

The tide speaks in a dialect I almost know, consonants of gravel pulled across the floor, vowels that open wide as tidal pools before they swallow back their light.

My grandmother kept jars of sea glass on a windowsill that faced the harbor. She said each piece had forgotten what it was before the water wore its edges into trust.

I have been that kind of forgetting— smoothed by years of salt and turning, no longer the bottle, no longer the storm, just something held up to the sun by a child who believes in color.

At dusk the fishermen drag their nets across the concrete pier like cursive, each knot a word they learned from fathers who learned it from the waves. No one writes it down. No one needs to.

Tonight I press my ear to a shell and hear not the ocean but the pause before someone speaks— that warm, unmeasured silence where all language begins.