At the end of Camille's post on the hamilton book, she gives us those marvelous lines of poetry from "The Inverted Forest," a story I've been working closely with these past few weeks...maybe too closely...in the poem that follows you bananafish will see the allusion...my q2u is about my concern with it being more than allusion...do you think I've used mr. salinger's poetry in the story too much to call this poem mine? The Trouble Tree The story goes he comes home each night and hangs his troubles like clothes on the branches of his hesitation. These days it's not war that causes his twigs to bend but his brother, their fist-in-face voices on the phone, their wrong silences, and how far they stretch between poles. What can brothering mean to these two, the only two, so different that to name their link a new language would only be the beginning? Underground is a root system secretly guarding and connecting inverted forests with emotional foliage and a water system thicker than blood. Deeper still a wasteland of wanting consumes with emptiness what generations meekly inherit as human nature. How he sees into his brother's core is a gaze skinning bark on this trees lowest branch, testing wood and age rings until the earth's true center is rooted. ***** will hochman