Salt Flats at the End of August

The lake has forgotten itself. What remains is white geometry, a crust of what water once believed it was — mineral, patient, permanent.

A crow crosses the distance without casting a shadow. Even sound here arrives secondhand, the way you learn of grief after the body has already prepared.

Somewhere below the surface brine shrimp carry their small red lives through corridors of salt, indifferent to the sky's enormous idea of what a horizon should be.

I drove seven hours to stand in the middle of nothing and found, instead, everything arranged very carefully at the edge of what I could bear to see.

The light does not set here so much as recede, pulling the day behind it the way a tide pulls sand from under your feet — slow, inevitable, tender.