Salt Flats at Low Sun

The brine has left its script across the mud— white cursive no one reads, contracting as the afternoon tilts its face away.

A crow lands where there is no shadow yet and stands there, bothering nothing, its feet invisible in the silver sheet.

I drove out here because distance looked useful. Now the horizon holds its breath in every direction, and I understand something about equal and opposite.

The sky pinks along one seam, then spreads. The flats take the color like an obligation— rose, then amber, then the dark that owns them.

Driving back, I carry the flatness with me: that particular quiet, ungiven and given, the way the crow just stood in so much light.