So rooted
seem couples to a child! Firm-trunked and tall.
Some scrawny: sparsely leaved or badly fruited,
but fixed and solid, works of nature all.
It challenges imagination
that choice was part of the creation.

That they,
these halves, weren’t mingled always, childhood fails
to comprehend. The stories of the way
one’s parents met are magic, fairy tales.
To know the seed becomes the tree
does not dispel the mystery.

Divorce,
unless it strikes our parents, flashes where
it cannot burst our faith. A sudden force
that leaves the broken trunks deformed but there,
disaster-stricken, strangely ill,
but giving partial shelter still.

We feel
this all collapse as childhood’s shed. The trees
we thought so firm and fixed were never real.
To navigate by them can only tease.
Whatever fantasies persist,
unmoving couples don’t exist.

To find
one’s half and gather height and leaves are less
like acts of nature than like hiking blind.
Soil shifts and landmarks vanish. We must guess,
our one-time orchard morphing to
a wood no map can guide us through.

Max Gutmann writes: “It took me a long time to make a poem I liked of this thought/experience. The form supports emphasis where it’s helpful, and that it varies from the iambic pentameter some readers expect mirrors the sense. I rarely feel my verse quotable, but I feel that about ‘To know the seed becomes the tree/does not dispel the mystery’.”

Max Gutmann has worked as, among other things, a stage manager, a journalist, a teacher, an editor, a clerk, a factory worker, a community service officer, the business manager of an improv troupe, and a performer in a Daffy Duck costume. Occasionally, he has even earned money writing plays and poems.

‘Old Growth’ was first published in Able Muse. Some of his ‘Travels with Alice’ limericks appear in the Potcake Chapbook ‘Travels and Travails‘. You can find more of his work at maxgutmann.com