What the Salt Flats Know

The flats hold everything that evaporated— marriages, the names of horses, the year a man drove west and did not stop.

You can walk for an hour and not arrive anywhere. The white crust cracks like old glaze on old clay, beneath it, something darker, patient, still wet.

Mirages here are not tricks but honesty: the lake that was, persisting in the light, refusing the grammar of the past tense.

At dusk the sky pours pink into the distance until there is no horizon, only gradient, only the body asking which way is down.

What the salt flats know, they hold in solution— too much to crystallize, not enough to drown.