Do you come here often?
(A pickup line in a bar)
​
Haven’t we met? You and I? I know I've seen you before. Somewhere…
Ah yes! One autumn night when the moon hung low over the backyard and my slumbering shadow dangled and dreamt in dark breezes on the wooden swing beneath the walnut tree…
Didn’t I see your eyes suddenly mirrored in the pool at the base of the hills? Ah yes! It was in the spring and it had just rained. Your budding breasts swelled as you snarled, then scurried up the slippery bank into the trees, turning, halting. You cocked your head and clawed at your ass and legs. You jumped up and down and plunged howling into the brush.
The next morning I woke from my dreams and sat silently with my people, watching from the hills as your people followed the bison south onto the plains. We grunted and turned north across the snowfields, to hunt the mammoth.
Was that it?
Or was it in the winter? On the sky-swept steppes? Soundless they slipped upon us, naked beneath the fur, our goatskin yurt a tiny star upon the horizon. The horse soldiers of the Great Khan left me lifeless and took you and ruined you for men.
Didn’t I gnaw your flesh on some forlorn ice floe?
Didn’t you drink my blood beneath a voodoo moon?
I know I have glimpsed you when the river sleeps and mountains dream and shrieks tumble from the clouds and there are murmurings in the forest that no ear has ever cupped.
(Wait a minute. Perhaps I have you mistaken for that trollop who dumped me in Tangiers. The face is familiar, but it’s been a long time.)
Oh well, I can't put my finger on it … like a distant song across the waves that binds us to crash upon a fatal shore. Round and round we go, until we fall into a rhythm, like the moon.