Your mouth is the first mouth — the mouth I approach from the mountains, from the stars — swooping like a hawk to catch it turning, to catch it white and hot. Ah, breathe down deep into my substance and come away with a memory of the source of things — the river returning on itself with salmon and men. Come down by the falling water in me. Chip off all the old edges of your rigid life and come running again in rocks and waves and winds, till both of us are worn down, eroded to grains of sand, our bodies strewn over a thousand lands, lost in a million winds, on the boots even of the star travelers. Let us unravel mysteries long knotted and entwined on fate’s billion-fingered hand, gnarled about us like these winter trees. Come at last, still patient to the poem in her palm — that simple verse: “Live and be happy.” From one another grow as though from a mutual soil. As though stones could not keep their shape and the moon depended on it. As though it had all come down to our love. Because it all has come down to our love.