In the time before Time,
When tomorrow and yesterday,
Subjects of the eternal present,
Held no power,
Served no purpose,
The goddess of Desire,
With hair like amber rays of sunshine,
Was constantly contented,
Conjuring answers with a flash,
To the faintest of urges,
Any and all, instantly sated.
There was never any hesitation,
No strife to overcome,
Only the alchemy of
Desires manifested,
Everything all of the time, always.
But then something happened,
Which had never happened:
The goddess was surprised –
A red wolf came out of the forest,
In the middle of the night,
To sing a song at the moon,
Lacking lyrics but compensated
By pure passion.
This was the First Moment,
Birth of all timelines,
The beginning of the story.
Goddess and the wolf,
Side-by-side and in stride,
Went everywhere together,
Across empty plains and frozen mountains,
All on the wolf’s whim,
Instead of the deity’s desire.
They explored the hidden world,
Unknown to all except the hound’s nose,
The instrument of ultimate curiosity.
Wherever the wolf would lead,
So would go Desire;
Into a world not of her making.
She stumbled across,
On the crimson canine’s leash,
Unimaginable treasure troves of adventures,
Unlike any former divine formation of her past,
Seeming like a whisper compared to the bellow of beauty,
Only her hound could hunt.
Finally,
The Goddess could know herself by the world discovered,
Instead of the realm imagined,
All thanks to the partnership of her pup,
Unaware of her own worth.
The universe gasped when Time was born;
It would be hard not to, considering the consequence,
But even the fish and the birds,
Beasts and the dead,
Rocks and mountaintops,
Clouds, bugs, trees and the sun itself blinked,
Took a breath, the first of their last tomorrow and
Exhaled the genesis of yesterday.
Only Desire knew what She had done,
Out of necessity by nature of desire;
Tala had disappeared in the night,
Stolen away from the goddess’ sight,
Absent from all of their favorite discoveries,
Silent to her calls.
The Goddess needed Tala more than she had wanted anything,
Yearned for her wolf to come back home,
Seeking out that which wasn’t there.
Such was the power of the deity, though,
Even unbeknownst to her,
That her songs of mourning,
Echoing through her every act,
Like some sorrowful residue,
Grabbed ahold of the world itself,
With inertia begging existence,
For the first time,
To stay put.
Her heartache held like mortar,
The past securely in its place:
Finally she had found her companion,
That concealed claret canid,
Right where they had been before,
Exactly as it was.
For Tala:
In Samoan, your name means story,
So I thought I would try,
As best as I can,
To write yours.
Take this meager token,
As exchange for your time,
Even though we all know,
That I got the better deal.
In my internal language,
Your name with eternally mean:
Frustration, annoyance, adventure and laughter,
But what I think of most of all,
When I think of you is,
To have loved and to have lost,
The best friend I’ll ever have had.