Salt Flat at Dusk

The lake has been gone for ten thousand years but the ground still holds its shape, a white mirror facing the wrong sky.

Nothing casts a shadow here at this hour. The mountains are a rumor at the edge, blue and approximate, receding as you walk toward them.

A car passes on the highway miles out, its sound arriving late and altered, the way news comes from very far.

You kneel and press a palm to the crust. Beneath it: the patience of brine, of matter that has outlasted every reason to move.

The sun lowers into its own reflection. You are briefly two of yourself, standing in the seam where time forgets to run.