Salt Lick

The deer come at dusk to the exposed rock where mineral seeps through limestone, their tongues mapping a need older than any word for hunger.

I watched them once from a kitchen window in a house that no longer stands, the glass warping their shapes into something almost liquid, almost holy in the failing light.

What the body knows it knows without translation — the way a root turns toward water through blind soil, the way my hand still reaches for a doorknob that isn't there.

There is a field I cross in dreams where the grass has been worn to a path by something patient and returning, and I follow it each time to the same unremarkable stone.

Salt and silence. The deer lower their heavy heads. I have never stopped being thirsty for what I cannot name.