Salt Workers at Dusk

They wade the shallow pans at closing light, rakes drawing slow cursive across the brine, and the crystals rising like a second shore beneath their cracked and whitened hands.

All afternoon the sun pressed down its kiln. Now it softens, pours its copper into the channels between the flats, and the workers cast long shadows that touch the water before they do.

A woman tilts her hat back, reads the color of the pools — amber means another hour, pearl means the harvest sets. She has no word for this knowledge. It lives in her wrists.

Egrets fold themselves along the levee, patient as the drying wind. Salt crusts the hems of everything — trouser cuffs, wheelbarrow rims, the song one man hums without knowing.

When the first star appears they will gather their tools and walk the bleached path home, tasting the whole ocean on their lips.