The Sycamore's Caress

A sensual prose of longing for a lost lover, entwined with a sycamore in Little Missouri.

A mist wove through the Ouachita hollow in the Little Missouri River Valley, curling around a wandering girl whose heart, a restless bird, longed for her lover's vanished touch. Limestone crags cut deep into the rock that glowed in dawn's early Ouachita light. Their sharp edges mimicking the ache coursing through her naked, trembling body. She had shed her clothes days prior, intent on experiencing nature in her natural state. Her bare feet pressed softly into the moss-covered ground of Arkansas's river valley. The damp softness felt like a faint echo while the bite of cedar filled her lungs, sharp and alive with primal song. The morning dew collected on her lips, tasting tart like unripe persimmons from Little Missouri's banks, and a whippoorwill's cry pierced the stillness of dawn's hush. A sycamore rose before her, hard, erect, a memory of her lover's body, its bark flaking like shed skin under a watermelon sky, its branches reaching as if to hold her close, wanting to be her lost lover's substitute in this sacred river hollow.

She knelt before the tree, caressing its rough hide with her soft hands. Each ridge was a shadow of the palms that once traced her spine under starlit pines by the Little Missouri. The petrichor of sweet, wet Earth permeated her nostrils, coating heavy like the breath of her lost lover against her face in summer's glow. A soft breeze stirred the leaves, their faint rustle as a whisper in her ear like a lover's vow, and she tasted sap on her breath, sweet and thick, like the kisses she was craving beneath Ouachita stars. Her hands found a root, warm and steady; its pulse beneath its skin was a cruel stand-in for a heartbeat pulsing beneath a lover's flesh in twilight's riverside embrace. Light slanted through the canopy, gilding her arms in a golden glow, and she yearned for the warmth of flesh, though the tree's embrace was all she held in this lonely dawn.

The hollow's chill grazed her skin while the air was thick with pine, and the faint musk rose from the carpet of fallen leaves in Little Missouri's heart. Her pores opened, raising goosebumps all over her exposed, yearning skin. She leaned into the sycamore, pressing its trunk firm against her body, a fleeting mirror of another's bare chest pressed close under a crimson dusk by the river's bend. A stream's murmur threaded through the sycamore's branches, and the dew was still and thick on her tongue, now soft like a lover's lips kissing hers in a dream's caress. Redbud blooms glowed against the limestone, their vibrance a pulse she now craved like a wild hymn. Her desire raged, wild, like a fox running through brambles in the valley's depths, yet tender like the fingers that once weaved with hers. The tree's touch was a pale substitute for flesh in her soul's fire.

She stood and parted her lips to suck in the air's faint sweetness, honeysuckle-scented, tucked behind her ear like a girlhood memory in summer's warmth by the Little Missouri. The sycamore branches arched, their shadow bowed over her soft features, a protector she welcomed like those arms that once encircled her under a star-pricked sky. Her fingers caressed a leaf as a lonely hawk's cry broke the silence of the river hollow. It was as sharp as her body's cry for sex, her body's primal song. The hollow shimmered, mist fracturing the light into sacred shards, and she bore her longing forward. The sycamore's caress was only a fleeting balm for her primal ache in the Little Missouri's embrace. Nature's embrace held her, but sensual touch remained a ghost in the dawn's tender light.

—Noisy Wren, ‘25