Capilano

The rain is the sound of geology breathing. I stop and close my eyes for a long moment and listen to it hitting the trees’ canopy, an ancient percussiveness. Your voice ahead of me says something I can’t comprehend. Your voice that, inside my closed eyes, becomes an image of the lime raincoat you are wearing. Each thing dissolves into something else: the mist drifting like white hair underwater, the weather becoming an ecstasy. We walk across a narrow suspension bridge slung over a gorge. The river thrashes like a green snake below. Among the trees, you make bird calls that sound like hurt birds. You keep wanting to climb the cliffs, testing their little holds, their fissures cleaved by water and by ice. In time I have come to comprehend this: that you believe in the world by touching its every face. You walk in front of me, and I, like a figure in a myth, obey.