Salt Lick

The deer come at dusk to the exposed rock, tongues rough against mineral and time, wearing a hollow the shape of patience into what the mountain offered up without being asked.

I have loved like that — pressing my mouth to what the world left bare, tasting iron and old rain, the faint sweetness underneath where stone remembers the sea.

There is a field I knew once where the fence posts rotted standing. The wire held its shape in air long after the wood gave way, a sketch of what containment was.

Everything I've kept too long turns to this: the outline without the thing, the gesture after the hand withdraws. The salt still on my lips.