(prose) poem for January 11, based on the poem for January 4, and also based on a real life love affair that cooled much too quickly...

Gateway

I think I met him ten million years ago, when I roamed feral trees as a split-winged dinosaur. I have flash memory of it, of a place lush and tired, waiting for sky-fallen disaster, a connection of eye against leathered skin. I met him again, twice, again, lifetime against my throat, my mind, my eyes, one recognition after another.

We will slow time to nothing, stop time. I read his email, remembered days in childhood when minutes spread into hours, expected my visit to be fun and uninhibited, maybe even timeless in some way.

This time I met him at a gate, a security frame, a place where people purged from an airborne tin can. I saw him lean against a sign, his arms folded over his chest, brown t-shirt against cold metal. He saw me, too, my red dress, cowboy hat, and he rushed beyond the buzzer, pressed his lips against mine, met my tongue. He made his hello second, almost last, although we hadn't yet met, not in the physical, in these bodies, only on paper.

"Hey, you." He smiled, caught his breath, grabbed my bag, my arm, dragged me wanting through a terminal, an exit. We climbed in a bus empty and sad, but we filled it, made it real and heavy and fast with my pink suitcase and his lips and the way we recognized each other from some past eon when footprints covered wet sand. "Hey, you," I answered, kept my mouth against his, ran fingers through his hair. I remembered it, it wasn't new, was a million million years old, my fingers knew the twist and black of his curls.

I can't tell you the next part. It's sacred, a hidden ancient scroll, two days of sweat-burned hymn spent in one room, a second act, a bridge, all the days you wished for Christmas and birthday and death rolled into forty-eight hours of athletic sacrifice. We talked, too. I remember every word of it, though the recall of fingerprint against thigh meets my mind first.

Time felt drowsy, full of beaded sweat, and a glance at the hotel clock revealed eleven hours difference when it should have been one, maybe two. It's all backward, I wondered. Time speeds, it doesn't sleep. I didn't know the clock didn't matter, that my perception of slow-ticked movement was real, genuine. I felt him rise from the bed to finish a work project. My eyes stayed shut, my mind on vacation time emptying into a sea of coded thought. I want this to last forever. I held the last second of his cheek resting on my forehead as if it were a golden ticket, a lottery voucher, something I could not lose or I would be poor, forgotten.

"What's my spirit animal guide?" He asked me with sudden surprise. I conjured up a walrus, a platypus, a thousand different creatures with webbed limbs and tusks and unusual underwater practices. He sat at a particleboard desk, gentle hands against keyboard as he calculated arc and rhyme.

"You're a cat. You're stealthy, move with grace and rhythm, you snarl, you purr. A cat of proportions. A mountain lion." I knew as I said it my words carried a benediction. A lion, a cat without care, a feline of arid hunger with ulterior motives and paws of steel-set fur. A mountain lion. Yes. I watched him click the mouse, move pages along the screen, and my body felt warm and complete under the covers.

I watched him measure and think, calculate and serve. His hands trembled as he worked, but his gaze remained clear, stuck and married to the particles of light emanating from his screen. I lay naked, tired, the cells of my arms absorbing his motions. Tell me your secrets, I thought. Tell me why you hold that sadness, that infinite echo.

He didn't answer my thought, not in words or action, but my mind grabbed a chain of command, pulled meaning from each tap of a key. He turns ideas into reality, I thought. He knows things, know they exist, they breath, holds them at eye's length, analyzes them, tells their secrets in what only looks like simple story. I know him. I know his thoughts. I almost remembered him from some other existence, felt him draw an oval in the dirt with one foot, almost saw him dance the same concept pattern around piled stones he echoed in this life.

He didn't notice my mind walking through his veins. He knows he lives in concepts, brings fully formed ideas to life. He knows this. But he doesn't know they why of it, why his work is important, why he packages logic, why he articulates spheres of thought. He will know someday. That dance is deliberate. He doesn't see how it grows each time, collects air and sun from the environment, doesn't know it rotates an eccentric lathe, his mind the pencil that completes some delivered plan. We all do this. We never see it.

We packed his things, brought them to a copy store. I held papers under plastic boards, let lights sway, tick, and record, carried prints to him, watched him lay them upon a board, make them talk, make them real. The store people didn't notice us, didn't see the way he made the thick of trees talk with numbers and reason. I knocked over one display, then two, my body giving noise and entropy to the night, to the rain pelting his car.

"Sorry," I kept saying, as if my words meant something, as if I was truly sorry, but I wasn't, I wasn't. I wanted the night to end in fireworks and scattered boxes. I wanted him to see himself beyond the paper.

That night he traced the symbol for infinity along the space between my breast and hip. His index finger created a vortex against my skin, moved round and between, above, under. What is that, he said.* What is that called?*

I stuttered for a moment, as if my voice patterned his hands. I couldn't remember the math, the mobious strip, the reason I met him at all. Then the sun burst through his fingertips, told me stories of dinosaurs and time, the places we laid, the times we travelled forward in time, disconnected moments we fell backward, back into what was. I felt the trace burning my body, connecting top to bottom, organs to air, dry lands to humid, my knowledge to his. I closed my eyes, tried to remember, saw a flash of a gateway, a high weathered curve, a future moment, a holographic project, a steel sun mirror from ancient leathered beasts to two humans in bed.

"It's the lemniscate," I finally answered. "It goes forever."

I saw him last six days later, six months later, six lifetimes later, a sideways eight burned into the space between my eyes. It doesn't matter, I thought. Infinity means forever, means the days blend to the past, to the future I always try to define, means these moments were a lifetime, a mountain lion roaring at his reflection, a homeless bird hovering over some meadow truth, no time, no place.