Salt Flat at Dusk

The last light lays itself down across the flats like a man who has walked too far, stretching out thin and golden, spent.

No shadow falls here without argument. Each rock declares itself twice— once in the world, once in the mirror of the ground.

A hawk hangs in the middle distance, stitched to nothing, reading the heat the way the dead read silence.

The salt remembers the sea in its bones, that old salt, that ancient patience, holding the shape of water with no water left.

When the sun finally drops below the mesa the sky goes violet then bruised then nothing, and the flats hum with what the dark has swallowed whole.