" 'The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon' "

She swims in the pool. Each evening, as I step out onto the balcony, newly naked and ready for bed, I look down to see her. The first cool air of the day swirls around me, it clatters the brittle summer-scorched leaves together and spreads her silver form in the water's ripples. She waits for me and she gathers herself together - drawing in her refracted silver shards and straightening the wrinkled surface of our liquid sheets. And when the pool is still, with her sat whole and patient in its centre, I dive down, my hands parting the fat 'O' of her fullness. And her silver slicks over my skin, until underwater we are combined entirely. She is the cool gasp at the end of long wilting days. She is the quiet privacy that comes after too many brightly-coloured, noisy hours.

She is shy at times - drawn into nothing but a wry smile. But she always swells - slowly, seductively - until she is ripe and grown heavy on her rippled branch. And it is then that I dive into her, where she waits just beneath the skin of the water. I pierce it, fingers first, and swim inside her - the whole silvery pool of her, so cold it makes me shiver. And she pours into every crevice of my body and stains me with her shimmering colour. I stay under there, enveloped in her love, until my lungs claw at the walls of my chest and I burst forth, erupting in a shower of silver spray, and crawl onto the damp grass to pant and quake and drift off into dreams of my beautiful moon.