cave paintings.

If you do not count the sheepskin sprawled across the floorboards, caught between coffee table and television, I have never loved an animal thing such as I have loved you. Your feral heart lunges at my spine, slips a blooded finger in and pulls me to pieces, vertebrae by vertebrae. I took osteology once, I know their look—coarse stone claws or cavespace hooks to hang a club on, furry hood, stomach bag full of pink meat. We were together even then, in those ancient days of monoliths. You’d go to fetch some slivery fish while I tended fire and boiling water, hum a song or two. And when you returned, I’d salve your wounds, place a new crown over your brow, lay down some creature skin 'cross your wide shoulders. Or if I was your hunter, you might hold a clay bowl close to my throat and tilt its elixirs warm past cracked lips. Then strength regained, we might dance, and I'd find a fallen pine to carve us in picture (so Love's there, xylem-frozen forever).

But time changes souls, and the microwave screams your plastic dinner is done; I will not eat. Sensing our history, we tried (did we?) to fill our home with past-life souvenirs—a few potted trees (bred to facile & dwarfed domestic perfection), a tank full of fishes you forget to feed, this antique table we wouldn’t dare cut into. And this lanolined rug I love to sleep on and dream I am back in our cave, or on some soft green hillside with a younger sun lightcharming my face—until I awake and find it’s just you, you who used to carry that lupine look in eyes and limbs, you. You've turned on the TV again.