Salt Flats in August

The salt remembers everything the sea forgot— white crust cracked into hexagons, a geometry the earth made before anyone arrived to name it.

You drive until the road dissolves into the shimmer, that trembling edge where distance becomes a substance you could almost hold.

A heron lands. Impossible here, a hundred miles from water, yet it stands on one thin leg as if waiting for the tide to find it.

The mountains on the far side keep their purple silence. Nothing moves. Nothing has to. The light does all the work, burning the hour clean.

By evening, shadow fills each crack the way a river fills its bed— not arriving but returning, convinced it never left.