One Illuminated Letter of Being by Donald Platt

I knew of a woman who, in the course of a terminal illness, and without giving much thought to the matter, expressed a liking for sweet peas. Before long, every table, every shelf and windowsill, was filled with the scent and colour of this most youthful, this most joyful of flowers until she could bear to look at them no longer. Such are the pitfalls in the prelude to loss.

This rather sad memory resurfaced after reading the collection of thirty-two poems in which Donald Platt lets us in on the uniquely personal, but ultimately universal trials of his mother’s illness, her death, and his subsequent mourning. Unflinching, but tenderly descriptive, they take us through the quiet courage, the moments of weakness, the little acts of unselfishness inherent in such an experience, in a gentle, but compelling series of unrhymed tercets. Along the way, autobiographical detail lends colour and perspective to a slowly developing picture of Platt and his family’s relationship with Martha, an artist and lover of classical music, who died in 2014 in her nineties. We meet, among others, Dana, his “million-piece jigsaw” wife with her own experience of recent  bereavement; his brother with Down syndrome whom his mother had not wanted to see in case her “skull-like head and jack-o’-lantern face…” might terrify him; and his two daughters making origami creatures — a peacock, frogs, ducks . . . for their grandmother sitting immobile in her yellow armchair. 

In the opening poem the author is looking at an old black-and-white photograph of himself at four years of age, lying in a bed alongside his baby brother. Their mother is smiling as she looks down on them both. Her eyelashes are long, he notes, and “her hair’s cut short. She’s dead.”  It’s a stark and arresting beginning to a tale which combines pathos, perception and occasionally humour, as when Platt finds himself in the meditation room at Albany airport after visiting his mother at the hospice earlier. He recalls her saying “I’m so ready to die” and prays that she will no longer have to endure her ninety-six-year-old body wrecked by sickness and pain. He remembers too the shared laughter at that colloquial “so” she had learned from watching TV. There’s something rather beautiful in that little exchange.

There’s a mingling of the factual and the lyrical, the day-to-day and the emotional that gives this collection such honesty; gives it integrity. I liked Martha’s attention to detail in planning her own funeral in “Fantaisie” (“. . . Bill Eakins to preach” — “give $100 to organist”); and in “Watercolor with Trees in Fog” the author remembers watching his mother paint: adding one last touch, a scrap of yellow, before appending the picture with a price tag of $65.00. He concludes, rather touchingly, that he will never be able to repay her. “Cloud Hands” is set in a hospice with various wards or units given Evelyn Waugh-esque names such as Harmony Lane and Hummingbird Hill. The place is described in detail, even down to its odours of urine, disinfectant and meatloaf. In Whispering Pines, his mother tells him it was good of him to come, and in a heart-breaking scene familiar to many, “the tears well up and burn my eyes so that I can no longer see her.”

Early one morning he receives a call to say his mother has passed on. Lung cancer, it says on the death certificate, and coronary artery disease. He had been with her only two hours earlier. Her ashes are buried — “a birthday present to the cold earth” — but she lives still: he talks to her; tells her what he has been doing. He sees and feels her presence everywhere. Sitting in a garden near Aubagne, east of Marseille, she is in “the silver green leaves of the twisted olive trees”; she is “the rooster that crows all night in expectation of the dawn” and “she’s the smell of thyme I crush between my fingers.”  There is a lovely moment when the author relates the story of how he came by the scar on his forehead. His mother had reminded him, one month before her death, how she had pushed him and a friend down the street on a sled, and they had crashed into a milk truck. And now the scar, the “signifier of my pain, of my mother’s self-blame” has become to him “love’s north star . . . still shining fifty-four light years away.” Such are the small compensations for the guilt and utter helplessness felt when witnessing the decline and passing of a loved one.

Plants, flowers, the natural world generally, feature a good deal in this fine narrative of love and loss: the “frail and foolish” crocuses that stand undismayed by desultory snow; the red-pink cloud of blossoms floating up from a crape myrtle; the lavender moth orchid he bought for his mother, and which he refers to as her “death orchid”. In “Wisteria” he’s planning to grow a variety called “Amethyst Falls”, building it a trellis anchored in concrete:

                                         and strung with horizontal
galvanized steel cable. I’ll train the wisteria’s wrought-iron vines
to climb and twine

through these staves, to become a sprawling G clef that will flower
into late spring’s
lavender notes, cross-pollinated by bees, its sound and scent carrying far

beyond our backyard.
On the harp strings of the trellis, it will blossom again and again into one
illuminated letter of being. 

It is a splendid poem, the last five words of which provide the title of this collection, describing practically but also quite beautifully the making of this living memorial to his dead mother. 

An old poet once told Platt that flowers were the only proper subject for poetry; it was an idea he dismissed out of hand at the time, but now he’s not so sure. His mother is dying when everything is coming into bloom, and there is a sadness, but also a sort of comforting inevitability in that fact; a parallel explored within these pages in an even, an almost subdued voice which, in its telling, is a quietly persuasive celebration of life.