Salt Flats at Low Sun

The flats hold the sky like a second sky, each cloud doubled and thinner below, the horizon a seam the world presses shut.

You walk and your shadow walks ahead, longer, darker, more certain of direction — it has already arrived somewhere you haven't.

The crust cracks under your boots like old porcelain, white giving way to amber giving way to rust, the colors of a day unwilling to end.

No trees. No sound that wasn't yours first. Only wind reshaping nothing into nothing, and the light doing what light does at the edge of things —

turning everything it touches into evidence that something was here, and found it worth illuminating.