question
WILL HOCHMAN (hochman@uscolo.edu)
Fri, 03 Apr 1998 08:56:59 -0700 (MST)
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