Salt Lick

The deer come at dusk to the exposed seam where mineral bleeds white through red clay, their tongues mapping a geology older than the county road that cuts this hillside like a clause.

I have watched them from the kitchen window across three seasons of failing light, the way they lower their heads as if in prayer though it is only hunger, only the body knowing what it lacks.

Rain has carved a channel to the deposit now, a small river of need wearing the earth to its skeleton. Everything the hill once held in secret runs amber toward the creek.

My grandmother salted her garden rows against the slugs, against the wet, and nothing grew there for seven years. Some gifts sit so long in the soil they become the soil.

The deer will come again tonight. They always do — faithful to the wound in the land, to the bright vein that gives itself away.