Salt Cathedral

Far beneath the hillside where the river bent and forgot its name, miners carved a nave from pink halite, each blow of the pick opening a vein of ancient sea.

The walls still weep brine in summer, slow crystals knitting shut what the chisel parted. A child once pressed her tongue to the pillar and tasted a ocean that vanished before anything had lungs.

Light enters through a shaft no wider than a wrist. It touches the floor at noon for eleven minutes, then withdraws like a word you almost remembered at the edge of sleep.

They say the cathedral sings when the barometric pressure drops— a low chord the body hears before the ear does, the mineral memory of compression, of being seafloor, then mountain, then hollow.

I have stood in rooms like that, places where the weight of what was removed holds the ceiling up.