Moved Permanently

The moon has just risen, and I run, breathless, skipping steps and bounding into the bedroom to watch it bloom over the garage. It is wide and livid and orange, its bottom edge cut by the shadowed branches of the denuded silver maple. I turn and grab your foot, squeezing slightly at the arch.

"Wake up," I say. "You should see this." You stir slightly, mumbling something in a language that might be English, though really, it's anyone's guess. With a slow tilt of denimed hips, you curl your body away from the window, drape your right arm across your brow, as though to shield your face from the light. If that was your intention, you have failed. The moon illuminates the room with a light that is red, then silver, then orange, then purple. Your skin dapples, shimmers and glows. You are still water; you are glass; you are glowing embers. I do not let go of your foot. I do not turn back to the window.

I have never noticed until now the tender cut of your jaw, how the skin scoops inwards towards the throat, a reservoir for rain, or honey, or milk. I have never noticed the way your neck quivers next to the jugular. I have never noticed the way your sleep-sigh takes on a musical pattern, moving along in harmonic thirds, as though somewhere, in some dream, people are singing in chords.

Outside, the wind pulls the leaves in our unraked yard into tall columns. They take the shape of buildings, of trees, of women making one last backward glance. We are leaf. We are salt. We are warm earth, bracing itself for snow.

I give your foot a shake, but you do not stir. Briefly, I consider curling next to you, fitting my body neatly into the whorl of your torso, pulling your arm around my shoulders like a shawl. But I don't. Later, you will rouse yourself, stumble to your desk and work. Later, I will crawl into bed, shake the dust and sand from my feet before settling into the impression made by your body. Later, from the southern window, moonlight will spill down the wall, ripple across the bed, wash over my sleeping hands and shoulders and mouth. It will taste of salt.

The sound you hear is water. It clicks and tumbles over the rock eighteen steps from our tent and hurls itself over the side of the mountain, tumbling into the river, the river into the sound, the sound into the ocean and the ocean into the sky. You move your jaw in rhythm with the water and murmur in tune to dreams that you will not remember. In the dark, I try to read them from your face, but they are elusive and mysterious – a map I cannot read, a language I will never know.

We spent a summer on the mountain's rim, above the limit of trees, below the edge of the snows. We spent a summer with hundreds of marmots whistling warnings like cars in traffic, with the King Elk and his hundred wives – and the smell of them, wafting across the valley each morning. We lived with the fear of cougars – or I did, anyway, until it seemed that every shadow had teeth and every branch was a grasping claw. We spent a summer with heavy tools repairing trails, which is to say we rearranged rocks. And re-rearranged. We cleaned campsites and shoveled the shit of strangers.

You loved a mountain before you ever did love me. I say this without petulance or accusation. I say this because we are animal and we love what we love.

Sometimes I dream about a mountain locking me inside the rock, absorbing my body into itself. You would look for me, but you would only find rocky breasts, rocky thighs, a face carved from the surety of ice. In my dream you sit upon my granite knees and you are happy.

I had a dream that the mountain took you away. I dreamt that I woke and you were gone, leaving a warm imprint ghosting the place where your body lay. In my dream, I walked out of the tent to find you, running the eighteen steps to water, ignoring the shadows filled with eyes, the forest moving with sharpening claws. I looked up to the mountain's face and you were there, your body slung upon sharp sheets of snow. In my dream, I hiked back to the valley alone, and ordered that you would not be disturbed. No one should disturb a man in love.

It's cold and we need fire. I wrap myself in a blanket while you clomp to the porch and clomp back in, your arms wrapped around a pile of logs raining debris in a trail from the door to the fireplace.

You open the door and lean in, gather ash and dead coals with your hand, deposit it into a bag, let it fall in a soft gray cloud. Slowly, you pile the knots of paper just so and lay down the small logs and light.

As I watch you, I see what you will look like when you are very old. Your nose enlarges and bulbs forward: a tender beak. Your smooth brow folds upon itself like a topographical map. Your hands, your long fingers, gnarl at the knuckle, sprout spots like mushrooms, grow yellow at the nails. Your hair, shining now in the growing light, thins, pales, floats over your shining scalp like feathers.

Outside, the snow arranges itself into mountains, canyons and plains, retelling the story of a land built from the cruelties of water and wind. Outside, the black sky cracks into infinite shards of light, while the air etches love poems on the windowpanes. Outside, the wind hurls itself against the house, while the trees lean and flail as though about to fall.

Once – don't ask me when – I told a story to a child. "Once," I said, "there was a girl who stepped into the water. When she stepped into the water the muck under her feet began to sing. The loons across the lake called her name. The trees whispered that she should not be afraid. She dove in. Her mouth narrowed and puckered, her skin greened and shone. She thought fishy thoughts and sang fishy songs and when she was hungry, she swam to the surface to swallow a mayfly. She was full, and cool, and very, very happy."

The child thought about this story. The child thought for a very long time. "Is this story true?" the child asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Are you sure?" the child asked.

"Very sure."

"How can you know?"

"The nature of believing is that we believe and it is. If I tell you that I once was a fish, and you believe that I once was a fish, then apparently, I once was a fish. It's simple. Like a song, or a fable, or a science book. In the end, everything is poetry."

"Did you used to be a fish?" the child asked.

"Did you?" I asked, and I kissed the child on the forehead and said goodnight.