Sameena's Lament 

The Nature of Love

by Jessica Syme

Sundays on a winding road, trees spilling into my dreams with shadows

and sunlight, long arms of past and future,

fronds so old that the skin from a previous life is tickled back into existence.

 

The word ‘escarpment’ is carving rock in my mind,

chiseling cliff faces in my armour/amour,

and the winter sun over eggs makes it all too good to give away.

 

Yet, as you know, it is never two dimensional,

never a photo on the wall, in a frame, fastened into time and space by hope.

 

Hope is another word, cascading with the water down the rock, carving its own faces,

‘springs eternal’,

I want something; it is as if I can taste it, or smell it.

I can smell it on the autumn air,

my reaction – overwhelmed;

yet, I want that perfume,

to drown in some familiar jasmine sea,

to gulp down buckets of everything that has been denied,

to fill the empty chasms where the land has spilt under my dreams,

with unsullied air,

to gulp air like a new-born child, like a hungry lung, like the end of a cry.

 

I have no where to go now,

I have reached the escarpment and feel hemmed in,

double fences,

coupled with broken earth in places I can fall so easily from the landscape

into what?

Will you catch me?

You, reading politics in the sunlight, driving with one hand on the wheel,

blowing smoke up Canyon Road, not worried about the drop, the fall, the flight, the edge,

only the word with which to describe it.

 

If I see one more painting of one more rainbow over one more waterfall

in one more local gallery,

or one more green frog in agonistic hanging pose,

I will jump!

I will jump so far – up and out with a dancer’s leap,

that I will have time to pirouette before the fall.

Remember the first time you tried to catch me and we both fell.

We are both so scared now.

I never thought of jumping with someone,

holding hands.

It is a long way to the treetops, green and soft

looking like a bed never made,

only just left,

folded in on itself in winter foliage

– a green you could die in,

break a back, or a leg, or a stake through the heart of it all,

and limbs, silken, debarked, falling down pale trunks indiscernible from the branches,

hanging,

become a tree,

become a forest,

become an escarpment,

become the fall.

 

And I want it all, want more, want today and tomorrow and tonight, with no apology.

I want to love with no apology for needing a place to land.

It is the nature of love.