Salt Dialects

The tide speaks in a dialect I almost know, consonants of gravel drawn back through the throat of the shore, vowels left shining on the flats.

My grandmother kept jars of sea glass on a windowsill that faced the harbor — green, amber, the rare cobalt — each one a word worn smooth by a century of argument with stone.

I have been trying to translate the sound the water makes when it finds a hollow in the rock, that brief, held note before the next wave answers.

Some languages have no word for blue, only a verb: to do what the sea does at the hour the fishermen return, their nets heavy with the unsayable.

I press my ear to a shell and hear not the ocean but the pause between waves, the silence where the salt is teaching itself to sing.