As a child I was, and I recall all these decades later, three fold, and a couple years still more for recalling, and I recall and think back now, yes, as a child I was always climbing.
So many days on days on days of climbing.
So very closely I recollect.
Intimately.
This mind burst, this feeling, calling me to invoke it.
Go back it beseeches. This recollection. But no, recollection sounds all too severed.
Not nearly as organic, as felt, as lived. Always climbing.
This vivid memory.
Muscle memory taking hold. And that feeling. Sylvan.
Safe.
At last.
I ruminate now, three fold and a couple later.
Up and up and into that monstrous tree in the schoolyard when I was 5. Maybe 6. Maybe 5.
Disappearing.
Into its monstrous womb, its monstrous but never feared womb.
So welcoming in its embrace from root to tip.
As high as I could climb into its generous, shaded crown. From light, from sight.
Always so very nimble and quick at up-climbing.
Not so much in the treacherous stumbling down, foot seeking, testing, testing, anxious suddenly, searching for the stronger footholds, small and unsure and learning feet, all the way back down.
I’ve watched all these years later in my threefold and then some, and console myself too, that even with my young cats, in their play, even they rue the descent. But always quick and nimble like I was on the uptake, the ascent, the climb.
Like me, but not, for at least they were designed that way, as nature intended and left so. So unlike the young shoe-laced girl.
But both tree-climbers in spirit, so many are. Feline and female alike.
Spirits that seek shade or dark or the lunar light of subversion. Safety in this.
And respite from the glare, the heat.
The day.
For I wonder in this moment now, threefold and then some, I wonder to myself. Truly. Is there anything more glorious than a woman, skirt splayed, knickers on display, stockings holy, ripped in rapture by stray twig, leaves catching brushed locks, untidying, entwining, shoelaces tightened but feet still taunting, dangling triumphant, in the reaches of a tree, touching sky, touching full moon? Back then, some teacher or another was always at the bottom of my monstrous tree, coaxing, gently.
Kind teachers. Kind, god-fearing teachers. Catholic. Doing the lord’s work.
Trying their best with that clever but strange child, she who clung to the highest greenest outstretched limbs after each and every break-time.
Shamefully, red-faced, embarrassed by my arboreal obsessions, a loftiness even, but then my hiding, running away and up, my failed escape, I would have to return to class.
To classmates that maybe never really liked me.
Strange fruit. The lyrics return to me. Mournful Holiday. Courageous Holiday. Words she made her own.
Words that left sheltered students sickened by their song in my years of teaching later.
Yes, some trees bear strange fruit. And we mourn their providence.
For all the sweet scent of magnolia. Sickening sweet, mingling with ripened strange fruit.
So it is I think on trees and days of climbing when I hear the news. She hanged herself. My Moon-Face. Moon-Face. Not to anyone else. But to me. The messenger tells me ‘hung’. And I want to correct him. To say, No. A woman is hanged. Not hung. Not like some cheap tinselled Christmas ornament.
Hanged. But I can’t. I say how very sorry I am. He knew her better. Or longer. Words fail me. Flailing. I flail. Flail still.
But still, strange fruit and Holiday linger now, ripened. When last did I see her? And then it comes to, bursting forth, like split fruit. The memory, the mind burst, comes to me unbidden almost. Beseeching me back to childhood fancies. But later on and more present at first. Organic, branching out. She is high atop a tree at an after party, punch-drunk and stoned. High but undaunted. High up but fearless. And probably high. Demure but challenging.
Like her words that always seemed so simple but said so very much if you were discerning enough, open to their secrets, paying attention.
Sly like that she was. Feigning wide-eyed wonder. But surely, no fool.
Rebellion. Always. But stealthily, quietly, no fool. I interviewed her once, for her art-making. For a piece I was desperate to write.
I loved her art, even though there was always something about it that seemed to evade me, escape me, even me who longed for escape, just like her, hinting at such depths and such heights I was near lost to vertigo. Or burial.
‘I like playing with dirt.’ She summed it up. But again, she was sly like that. I remember her on that day now too. Our easy interview.
In a black polar neck and baggy light denim overalls she was. And a pair of camel suede ankle boots. There, a small rectangular locket.
I had to ask after the locket, for I have always loved lockets.
I had to ask what was inside, wondering if she’d lend confidence, a fleeting hesitation, checking myself, checking my uninvited inquisition, an inquisition after something that might be personal.
Hers, and hers alone. But she was effortless. Free. As always. As it always seemed. Always in her own sly way.
A penis on one side and a vagina on the other, she revealed, smiling, bemused but saintly, benevolent, beatified. Well, she laughed then, until the ink ran in the shower one day. Still, she never did open it to show me. On this day I remember being struck by how young she was, yet, radiant, a decade between us, but the next minute, so much wiser. And unspoiled in her wisdom.
I’d envied her sagacious slyness, playing the child, but all the while, really, the master.
I sensed so intensely again then, and then again. Yielding dirt, mud, clay, to her will, like it was nothing. Arable to her touch. So masterful. But still, making a job of building sandcastles and mudcakes endlessly. Yes, sly, and smarter than us all.
She handled all like that, like it was dirt, arable for creation, making it her plaything, like that mop of curls of hers that relinquished to her long masterful fingers, on that treasured day, treasured now, as she spun those unruly curls into two buns atop her head.
Those big brown eyes that flashed, blinking slowly, then quickly, an Ingrid Jonker poem.
Two brown butterflies. Alighting then, and then again, and oh how I revelled that sun-kissed morning, breathless, in her father’s garden, in their attentions as she probably made of me her plaything too.
But again, I return to remember her. Atop the tree. Again I think of Ingrid Jonker and her first collection of poetry published, Ontvlugting (Escape). Another subversive. Another prodigy. Another artist. And I think too of Ingrid Jonker and her sublime subversive art a legacy, a climb for women to tread, footholds, surer footed, and all the while her young body found drowned in the Atlantic Ocean.
Stones and pockets it goes. As it always has. For women are so good that way always.
Leaving their strange fruit unspoiled. Never too unsettling. Or too messy for someone else to clean up. Strange fruit still whole. Still glossy. Edible. Not even a worm in their flesh.
No, never like my boss all those other years ago, a man, a father, a husband, brains blown out by the gun he carried for large sums of cash that needed banking.
No, women are so good that way.
I think of climbing again. Climbing, climbing.
I don’t climb anymore. I have come to take in the shape of trees instead. Slowly, deliberately. To marvel, slowly, deliberately, as one takes a striking form to another from place to place, seeking light, solid earth, solid footing, and connection, and rain, surviving barren, surviving drought or flood, or windswept, in each their own striking way. I can’t help it now. I feel ashamed too. Recollecting, but closer. Branch to bone of my bone. I think of how I have failed trees. Why? But I follow. Though feet unsure. First a potted lime. I wished for yielding sour fruit and fragrant skin. And curried leaves.
But I did not learn to care for it. In its lonely, famished pot. And it died, sacrificing its final leaf to my cat’s whim one day, and then, no more. Then, still ashamed, I think of my most beloved of all. A river indigo that thrived in the lime tree’s emptied pot. So quick to replace it, I admit now. But I had learnt better by then, to care for it better at least. And then my mother, on a visit, ever restless and moved by the winds of change, she moved it. Be slow, deliberate. With trees. I should have told her. I did not realise then but I do now, that in the years it had blessed me it had bent its graceful boughs, and born its small round leaves and sweet pink and white blossoms not only for my pleasure, so foolish, but just so, for the light and air and cool, in fair measure, season, by season, and again, on my balcony. Moving the pot, the winds of my mother had uprooted it.
It perished too, withering, to a lifeless stick.
Another shameful memory now.
A skeletal stick of a life seeking light and air and cool. And rootedness.
But at least I mourned this time. More than for my lime tree for I was only a little wiser.
Mind bursts back to my friend, and Moon-Face was her name, to remember her, and then mind bursts again suddenly on a tree on the drive to a bookshop, me in the throes of a deep depression.
I give in now to mind bursts. Trying to make sense somehow.
There was a tree on a road I had travelled many times, back and forth. But I had been always so overwhelmed by the towering trees that threatened to crush me as I cowered in my tin can in the blustery winds come the blustering season. Terrifying. Like the unruly trees in Disney cartoons I grew up watching. But now, I am remembering a tree I noticed on one of my drives. And ever after.
How long had it been there? I had wondered that first time. Struck. Small, and almost bare, but so very straight.
So very, very upright.
This tree had reminded me of a sculpture of a young girl, plaited hair. Carved of wood, and in a garage of a friend, a sculptor. Sensitive. Sylvan. Another work in progress he laments whenever I ask after her.
And mindburst again.
The Mother Mary a jealous boy had trashed in a bin after his first sculpture class. So rooted. Her feet proud beneath robe. Seated in garden. As if among us. So rooted those feet. Lovingly brought back to life from the trash. Restored. Rooted. Mindburst a small painting I'd done in my final year at school of Erykah Badu, bald. Seated back. As if amongst us. Feet soles up. Forefront. Rooted. So rooted. But my straight up girl of wood and plaits. Another lamented work in progress.
Love at first sight, she struck me in her up straight strength, his carving. Just like this tree, I had thought. And every day, the lower I had sunk into depression that first sight, all the while, the up straight strength of this small tree saved me. Beckoned to me. Prayed for me.
Oh what it was to be small but up straight.
And I promised each and every day, by the will of that small tree, that I would not give in, never entire.
If only my Moon-Face had such a tree, I lament. To climb. Up. And up. But what of other climbings?
Climbing, climbing...
What of that little girl I was who climbed trees and came home to darkened cupboard caves where, in the comfort of hanging clothes and paired off shoes, she sat with her dime dozen plastic glow in the dark Mother Mary figurine, praying for elevation? Spirit? Climbing, climbing. In a darkened cupboard. And I recall but closer, the Mother Mary my hanged friend, my friend, Moon-Face for that was her name, the Mother Mary she once smudged for me. A black Mother Mary, inspired by my fervour for the many renderings of the mother of Christ I had stumbled upon later in life.
It had been a gift when I confided in her my yearnings for the maternal in my religion. A religion that was abandoning more and more the hymns I used to cherish, so close to my breast, those hymns of the blessed Madonna. In soft pastels. Or was it pencil. But so soft like pastels.
I scrounge, death sinking in, the sickening sweet of magnolias, seeking, seeking in earnest for the Mother Mary she once made. Pastels so soft. Or pencil rendered pastels so soft. My Moon-Face. Lost, and gone, the Holy Mother, so soft but strong so sly like that and amongst us and once treasured gift. I am such a fucking idiot and I conclude I probably gave it away in one of my many manic fits.
Bipolar that I am.
Bloody hopeless. Bloody foolish too. Foolish still. Fucking idiot.
Mostly, I fret these losses less these days.
I can always find another ring. Another dress.
Just things.
But my Mary. She is lost now. And my Moon-Face is gone. Away with my fallen trees.
And she can never conjure me another. I curse myself. Bloody bloody foolish. Fucking idiot. But it is too late now. I return to the piece, the piece I wrote on her. It’s all I have left. One of my better pieces in truth, for she was the muse. Just like Ingrid Jonker I can only imagine. With two brown butterflies. Her mercurial child-like wonder at times and unsettling sagacity at other times.
Yes. Mercurial like that. Or rather, as I thought at first, sly. Intentional. Subversive and sylvan. Yes, my beloved strange fruit. To me, my Moon-Face. I cannot shake the memory of her aloft in a tree. Closer still. Her delighting.
Beatified all the more. Free. At ease. Embraced and safe. By that verdant womb.
I want her just as she was that night. Escaped. Sly. So sly.
Deceptively wide-eyed. If you knew to pay attention.
If you knew to look closer behind those big brown butterflies.
She becomes my thwarted lime tree. She becomes my uprooted river indigo. She becomes another sylvan joy that has left this earth. Once such sweet bearing fruit of such arable earth. Or so I’d thought. No more.
And I think more and more on women who love to climb. Branch of bone of my bone. And I miss my friend who played with dirt and disappeared into trees. Blossoming by waxen light.
Climbing, climbing. Tree top. Reaching for the moon like low hanging fruit.
She always was the strangest fruit.
My Moon-Face. Sylvan.
The Trees and the Axe by Arthur Rackham
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