Marri (Remembering Meelup Regional Park)

The forest breathes us in. We are chasing bush orchids. Kambarrang is singing. Through a macro lens, petals bend, fill the screen. Blue; beard; duck. Your grin dazzles, blonde hair curling around my heart. We laugh. The forest smiles with us. Donkey; elbow; leek. Beyond the breadth of this, ocean swims. Here is the place of the moon rising. The forest sighs. As do I. You smile wide, engulf tree and leaf and trunk. Fire; slipper; sun. You say to me how love is a like a wildflower: a moment that recurs again and again when the conditions are perfect. As in how they are between us. Now. In this instance. Your kiss persists, travels through time, backward and forward. Fairy; helmet; hare. The forest knows that, in two years from now, we shall fall apart. Give up this connection. How, in four years time, I shall write these lines, and our love shall exist one more time. For a moment. How sometimes a poem is just a memory, remembering. Hammer; rattle; babe-in-a-cradle. And I want to believe that we can love forever, but the conditions fall apart, like us. This is why we take photographs. This is why we write from the heart. That is why I dance with you now, beneath the marri trees, in the hope that one day you shall marry me. But you shan’t. The forest breaths us out.