Lakeside, where the water has risen to drown the pines. Days are cool, shaded affairs; the sun doesn’t top the mountains until almost noon. He breaks the surface tracelessly, a head growing out of a head, wavy hair tying scalp to scalp, eyes rich, brown and flawlessly empty beneath sorrowful eyebrows. Up he rises, shoulders, waist, hips and thighs; seven feet of meat balanced, eventually, on the placid skin of the water.
Crouches; he squints eyes new made at the sun, grins to find himself blinded. Slow turn on the balls of his feet, naming. Grounded in language he jogs toward the shore, water-striders and trout nipping at his heels. He breaks the silence with a yelp and races through the trees mother-naked. Unsettled in his skin, now humus brown, now tree brain white, fir dark, arbutus red; a creature of moods.
He pauses at the road, kneels to run fingers innocent of prints over cool asphalt. There is a city two, three days to the east as he runs. He eats distance and mountains, heading downwoods towards streetlight, people, buildings; pregnant with meaning, wilderness barrels irresistibly toward an immovable collision.