Salt Dialect

The tide has a grammar no one transcribes, its sentences erasing themselves on wet sand, each wave a revision of the one before, and the shore accepting every draft.

I learned my first words from salt, the way it stiffens cloth on a clothesline, the way it finds the cut you forgot you had and speaks directly to the nerve.

Fishermen mend nets in a silence that is not silence but a dialect of hands — shuttle, knot, pull tight — the vocabulary of making whole what the sea has torn.

My grandmother kept a jar of it on the windowsill above the stove, coarse as crushed quartz, iodine-dark. She said every ocean remembers the rivers that emptied into it.

Tonight the harbor wood groans with the swell. I press my tongue to the back of my teeth and taste the residue of every word I swallowed instead of saying aloud, each one still brined, still legible.