Salt Lick

The bluff gives itself to the river in whispers — a crumbling ledger of red clay and feldspar, centuries thinning into current.

Deer come at dusk to press their broad tongues against the exposed face, tasting what the earth has been keeping.

I watched my grandmother fold salt into bread dough, her knuckles white with flour, and thought of how the body learns what it is missing.

There is a patience to dissolution — the way a hillside offers itself grain by grain, the way a voice carries further over water than it ever could across a field.

Something in us answers to that slow release, the mineral ache of things becoming less so the river can become more.