{ Carol Muske-Dukes: Twin Tree. }

[delga]

Twin Tree
by Carol Muske-Dukes

A tree divided. It grew like that—
Its slender trunk suddenly forking,

Lifting up from the crux in two Shiva arms—
As if it had come to a crossroads and split

The way twins unpeel from one another
In the womb. Two from one, it reached up

And flourished this way—it topped thirty feet
As its thick dark glossy leaves, half-folded like

Paper boats, kept the nubs of coming pears
Hidden then dangling. Avocado, avocado.

I held you in my hand as a big wrinkled pit,
Propped you (as I'd been taught once by a lover

Who was trouble) with four toothpicks over a glass
Filled with water—till the tiny white filament inside

Your worried seed slowly let itself down into the
Clear transparency, while sprouting above into a

Green feasible stem. I transplanted those floating roots,
The top-heavy shoot after weeks—then waited till it

Reached out at last—growing fast in both directions,
Down into dirt, up into the sky over the backyard. When

It twinned, climbing upward, I stopped my husband,
Standing hard by with shears, from pruning it back

Into one: The only way it would survive he said. But
It doubled skyward into the single tree at the top—

A hermaphrodite—as it had to be to make fruit. So
Many alligator pears, summer after L.A. summer! We

Filled baskets with the abundance of the you
And you: the fruit of two separate flowerings

From one quick hesitation. Till days after David died,
When clumsy workmen, digging a trench, severed your

Taproot. I saw the white exposed arteries they'd chopped clean
With their spades. I stood beside you weeping, trying to hold

Your heart together with my hands at the fork where you'd
Leaned apart, then towered. You were my love, conflict tree,—

Tough-skinned, the rich light-green flesh beneath. Avocado,
They killed you. When we sold the house, you were a cut stump.

--

There is a small temple - a shrine, really - in Gujarat that I visited when I was ten. It was a shrine to Shiva. I remember it being an eerie hollow, and that the shrine was dark. All around the clearing were these enormous trees which sprouted from one another, growing up and then down, and then back up again. I have never seen anything like it before or since.