Twin Tree
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 a 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.
CAROL MUSKE-DUKES is the author of sixteen books: poems, novels and essays. Read more.
"Twin Tree" from Twin Cities by Carol Muske-Dukes, copyright © 2011 by Carol Muske-Dukes. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.