briny

Of, pertaining to, resembling or containing brine; salty.

on the briny deep

The sea.

[Julian] Barnes wrote “Nothing to Be Frightened Of” when he was 62. He just turned 80. This briny English writer, author of “Flaubert’s Parrot” (1984) and a winner of the Booker Prize, for “The Sense of an Ending” (2011), now has a rare form of blood cancer, treatable but exhausting and uncurable.

I thought I would go to the sea and shrink down very tiny / And slide inside the telephone wire that runs under the briny