Isomorphism

I wrote the name of your unborn child in the first notebook I ever owned.

It appears that the expanse of time was unknown to me, and yet…

It appears that I was grasping for you

with the fingertips of my mind, tracing spirals

on every concave thought that framed

(your place?) in my periphery, even then.

So it would seem that I’ve been circling you all along,

running up and down spiral staircases too many times and places

asking myself “can anybody hear me?” and “who are all these people?” all along,

But now I can run my finger along the rip-seam of our event horizon

calmly, because I know we are cradled safely in this timeline, for now.

And yet, I want to shake this time-crystal loose from its setting!

I want to send it shattering to the floor and feel that pleasure tear through us both.

To grab the spinning clock-face by both hands! Yes –

To rip it from the wall and delight in its ceasing, divinely

having chased you all this time, then,

having turned, and seen you chasing after me,

and having delighted in this recursion:

I only want to keep reaching for you –

never to catch you (for you are not to be caught),

but to always keep your glimmer between my fingers,

up and down and all along these fractal bends.

Your glint of light between my pen and paper,

my mind and itself, or yours: wordful ink and passion

arcing through the slick gleam,

that is what I might have always sought:

The glint of you shining,

too brightly to deny–even to myself–

although I would like to forbid

all those spiral staircases and all

that wrongness that has plagued me,

I would like to close my door to this fateful insistence

that can’t ever truly be mine, but

to do so would be to deny your rightness, which I cannot do.

So instead I reach for you, and it would appear

I don’t really want to close my fist around your light –

I just want to keep it always visible between my fingers,

that it will sometimes grow to envelop me completely,

that I will be able to sink into it at the end of every spiral.

I want to rid us of the walls and locked doors that forbid us!

But not those hallways,

not those bed-chambers of the mind,

not the sidelonging that has compelled us thus far.

It appears that I only ever want to walk your hallways

with you, and eat when we are hungry,

and have sex in every room

with a flung-open door like the one

in my very own chest.

No more endless spiral staircases,

no more ticking clocks,

no more wondering:

just curiosity, connection, and rest.