Velvet by Moonlight

More about Velvet by Moonlight

The mountain had been arranging this night for ten thousand winters and did not
know it. Snow lay where autumn storms had rammed it against the upper teeth of
the range; beneath that white weight, meltwater worried one crack wider, then
another, until a river found the cliff and spent itself over the edge. Pines climbed as
high as root and stone would bargain. The lake below took every blow of the falling
water, broke it, swallowed it, went smooth again. No preparation. No audience. Just
weather doing what weather does until, by accident, the pieces fit.

The moon cleared the eastern ridge enormous and milk-pale, dragged its light
across the snowfields, and the whole mountain changed its skin. Ice caught fire
without heat. The waterfall swallowed the light and poured it back blue-white, one
impossible bolt of silk with enough violence inside it to grind the cliff grain by grain
into the lake. Spray climbed. Mist moved among the firs. Wet needles flashed and
vanished as branches turned. The lake opened its black surface and took a second
moon so cleanly the sky seemed to have broken through.

No animal cried out. No boot bruised the moss. There was no painter shaking over
an empty canvas, no lover reaching blindly for another hand, no old man desperate
to make the sight mean something before his heart quit. The valley had no witness
and therefore no manners. It became extravagant. Moonlight ran over granite faces
nobody had named. Snow cornices burned along ridges no road could reach. Mist
dragged itself low across the water and made the far forest appear, disappear,
appear again, as though the earth could not decide whether those trees belonged to
waking or dream.

Anyone standing there would have ruined it a little by needing it to be for them.
People are greedy that way: three beautiful accidents arrive together and
immediately someone invents a conductor. But the mountain had not lifted its peak
for applause. The river was not hurling itself into darkness to be remembered. The
moon had crossed dead seas and crater rims before laying one blade of light on this
water and would cross them again when every living thing in the valley was gone.
Still the beauty accumulated—light on snow, snow above water, water hammering
darkness into silver—until the place grew almost indecent with it, luxury poured
where no hand could own even a mouthful.

Then the geometry loosened. The moon climbed. Blue bled out of the waterfall. Its
reflection stretched across the lake, tore on the mist, disappeared. One by one the
snowfields lost their fire. Dawn would find only rock, trees, cold water falling exactly
where cold water had fallen the day before. Nothing kept score. Nothing mourned
the lost arrangement. For one hour the world had played itself past magnificence,
with nobody there to hear a note.

Then morning came and took the velvet off.