He didn’t lie with her until her mortal heart slowed, slowed, slowed, slowed to just a mumble in his big ear
His yawn a tunnel through time
A window too
Took respite in a cave to ease his arthritic thumb
For many moons and one sun
For most of the Neolithic age
The immoral wakes
Remembers centuries as minutes but what is time?
Memory is a river that churns ocean to ocean and cascades into the bluest of space
Thinks, as one thumb circles another for maybe a week
Ponders, without a clash of eyelids for no one knows how long
Imagining a tunnel through a cave wall
He might dig sooner or later
It matters less as he turns and sleeps some more
The immortal wakes
You can forget love, he told a beast that lay beside him injured from a great fall, perhaps from a higher cliff but not from the sky
that’s a different beast, one that doesn’t speak
The immortal slept through the crash, the thud
The dust cloud had settled by the time his eyelids like a cape on a bat opened wide and took in light
The beast could do very little but listen
The immortal wakes
He told the beast he had loved harder than the fall he’d taken days maybe weeks earlier
The beast groaned (so perhaps it was weeks)
He loved hard and deep like the tunnel he might dig
many moons ago
He didn’t lie with her until her mortal heart slowed, slowed, slowed, slowed to just a mumble in his big ear
They walked across mountains and planes, her asleep on his back, in his pouch, on the crown of his head
Her mortal rhythm taps on his skin
Skin maligned with the scars of eternity
Scars you’d expect, basins of old sweat, slowly drying up as he sleeps
They leapt like leopards until they flew like birds, he felt love was like that
leaps monumental and over and over until you feel like you are a bird
Across oceans they swam one hand digging through the weighted water striding onwards
the other keeping her mortal heart tapping against the palm of his hand held just above the water
He lay with her until her mortal heart slowed, slowed, slowed, slowed to just silence in his big ear
then the wind from the oceans, the very same oceans they once swam together, whipping across the earth
lifted the dust, the very same dust that surely settled upon his cape-like eyelids as they lay closed when the beast fell from a great height
became powdery blow on a brittle cave wall
he sent the wind back to the oceans with a scream that gave no one any rest least of him
until
upon a sleep he embarked to hold his memory of her in a thousand winter’s dreaming
The immortal wakes
he barely recalled the feeling of grief and why she was important
the beast smiled and asked, so you can forget pain but not love? The story of love is eternal not the feeling, the immortal said looking at the beast’s one lazy eye holding up