Salt Lick

The deer have worn a hollow in the cliff face, tongues rasping at the mineral seam until the stone remembers it was ocean once, gives up its ancient brine.

I press my palm against the groove they carved and feel the centuries of thirst— how wanting shapes the world more surely than any tool, how need finds the vein.

Below, the river carries off what the mountain can spare: silt, feldspar, the slow trust of granite learning to let go.

Everything I've ever loved has left this kind of mark on me— a sweetness licked out of the rock, a hollow where the body leaned and leaned and was fed.