Salt Flats at Low Water

The lake has gone somewhere else, left only its white signature behind— a letter the earth keeps folding and refolding but will not send.

We walked out onto the crust where the sky pressed down and the sky pressed up, and there was no telling which one we stood inside.

My shadow stretched ahead of me long as a wrong guess. You said the salt was millions of years of ocean learning to keep still. I believed you the way I believe everything that sounds like it knows something I don't.

What stays after the water leaves is the shape of the water's absence— bright and hard and exact, the kind of record that has no author.

At the edge, pelicans circled a shallow seam of brine. Something lives here that we would call almost nothing. It was indifferent to our wonder the way all necessary things are.