Salt Flats at Dusk

The salt flats hold the sky like a second sky, identical but inverted, colder at the edges where the crust begins to crack.

A heron stands at the far white margin— or its reflection does— and neither moves while the sun bleeds out between them.

I walked out here to find the place where thought goes quiet, where even the wind forgets its name and the hours pool without running.

There is a kind of silence that is not the absence of sound but the presence of everything too still to tremble.

By the time I turn back, the heron is gone, and both skies have darkened into one seamless dark.