Salt Flats at Low Water

The lake pulled back like a held breath, leaving its white residue— geometry of thirst, the land's own calcified dreaming.

Footprints hold their shapes here for weeks. Yours are somewhere ahead of mine, a dotted line toward the mountains that have not moved since before language.

At midday the surface becomes sky. I walk through clouds, inverted, and cannot tell if I am going under or rising without effort into something clean.

The silence is not empty. It accumulates the way salt does, patient, without preference, building itself from what the water left behind.