The Sicklebush

I was born in the eye of a sicklebush. I have been dead for many years. I have never been alive. I am no longer among the living where you reside, nor am I with your spirits, but in between each facet, each waving of a branch and crashing of the sea’s hand. I am in the rocks that line your shore and the jagged ones, further out, where you shattered your skull, flotsam, in the late night of springtime hours, centuries ago, moments ago, bursting apart like a tree losing its leaves.

I saw you approach. I saw you with your sailor’s cap, rubber pants, and sea glass eyes, learned the shape of your shadow as it stretched over my roots. I am in the eye of the sicklebush tree. My flowers are pink and yellow. I have been here for a million years and more, waiting for you to come bask in my shade. 

It gets loneliest at night. Rare are the night-blooming flowers - no hint of jasmine, no lurid whites and blues to paint the winding path from here to the greenhouse. Instead, there is the waxen skin of the apples in summer, tumbling from the branches to land squat and ruined on the concrete floor. Instead, there are the benches, where elderly folk come to remember, slowly, piece by piece, the light from between my fingers casting patterns on their wrinkled skins. Instead, there is the stickiness of citrus fruits and the heavy curl of flowers, unnaturally bright, the hot and dry shimmy of the bushes rubbing against one another. But I wait, seethe. Learn the shape of my new shadows.

I love this garden, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the wilderness. The wilds of you - I remember a fresher, youthful sort of anger. Teeth stripping the innards of bloodied fruit. Spitting seeds into the dirt at our feet. Do you remember the harshness of the desert - what blooms in that air, I remember you asking. What on earth could possibly bloom here?

They sometimes call me a Chinese lantern tree. I’ll bloom just about anywhere, or I won’t. You were the same, weren’t you? I know you were lonely, too. You caught my shape, the rough bark of me, tantalising on the horizon. A rounded sort of shape on a flat plane. I saw you crawl for me, sailor. You crawled over seaglass, over broken hands of water, over bone and brush. You crawled on your hands and knees, and you reached me. One way or another, you reached me.

I don’t miss the shore as much as the wilderness. Being here, in the garden, mere feet away from the lookout post, is almost worse. They don’t think I can smell it, but I can. Salt rusts to earth rusts to old blood, crying its way up from the shoreline. And I smell you, flotsam, drifting in the water. I smell your ghost, flotsam, drifting back out to sea. 

It’s my flowering season now. The thought brings a smile to my faceless face. In my arms, I hide centuries of spikes, and though I’m rooted, I’m ready to purse my lips and blow, ‘til all the parts of me I no longer desire are free to lift off into the air and escape. Maybe some will catch a spring draft, and carry downward to the south of the country, to the wilds of my birthplace, before my seeds got spread, to settle in the hot climate of some richer place, some hotter country, some peaceful thing. Maybe some will drift up until they can’t see me any longer, ‘til they’re just tufts of pink and yellow in cloud-land, ‘til they forget how to float back down to me, and I’m empty, and bare.

Maybe some will drift down past the barrier, slip past the lookout and land somewhere on the shore. Maybe I’ll make it to that dreadful smelling water, and drift out, unable to stop it. Unable to stop myself from swimming, caught in a rip, battered like fruit pulp, none of the fluffy petal shape left of me. I’ll twirl, sink, shoot back up to the top, to get caught in a maelstrom of foamy white nothing. Stinking of salt and sulphur. Letting the current take me far away. Maybe I’ll find a piece of you there, flotsam and sickle, and we’ll drift back out to sea.