My Dim Recall

© 2011 David Jasmin-Green

My dim recall
is that I know you from another time,
another place.
I was in exile, I guess you'd call it,
torn and trounced into submission
by the dominant male of my tribe.
My own father beat me and ousted me, I wept,
but the whys and wherefores
of that devastatingly brutal rejection
are lost in the mist of past lives
lying one atop another
like so many shed skins.

For a long time I wandered.
I hungered through the painted leaves and beyond,
crossing an eternity of ragged mountains
wrapped in unrelenting ice.
I was desperate, dying, I feared,
though somehow, by the will of God, perhaps,
I existed thin.
Eventually I stumbled across a valley,
a verdant paradise clothed in unfamiliar trees.
As I climbed ever downwards towards my destiny
I left the ice behind,
and when the wood was green I fed.
 
I scented you from afar, and I knew at once
that you were the one I ached for,
you were the root of my wanderlust,
the cause of my visceral hunger
and the niggling reason behind my every angst.
The dense, tangled undergrowth
infested with lone, creeping behemoths
obsessed with blood and meat, with death and destruction
was rank with the smell of easier prizes,
but I didn't want them.

Night fell like a funeral shroud.
I ran a long way through the wild wood,
sleek and eager, tempered by past frosts,
desperate for a whiff of your musk on the breeze.
There was food aplenty but I didn't crave it.
I tracked you across a wide swamp, over naked, rocky hills
where the dry wind burned my eyes, through deep gulleys
every twist and turn of which concealed
over-numerous, usually violent surprises.
I was driven half insane by your presence,
and by morning I sensed that you were close.
 
I found you in a dense thicket,
an almost impenetrable ring of thorn
where you lay fortified to deter
too many opportunistic predators
which, of course, included me.
You welcomed me with bared claws and snapping teeth
and a half-hearted but unmistakably hostile snarl,
so I backed away, momentarily beaten.
Exhausted, I dropped on a bed of moist leaf litter
close to a stream that snickered incessantly
about my ridiculous defeat.

I slept deeper than I've ever slept before or since;
I slept the sleep of the misplaced,
the sleep of the plausibly doomed
and possibly, just possibly the redeemed.
I was guarded by you and only you, I know it,
until the sun went down once more.
The moment you came to me, my love,
in a frightening and exultant revelatory flash
I forgave the multifarious iniquities of my father.
And we belonged all season.