Donald Platt’s fifth book of poems, Tornadoesque, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press. His sixth, Man Praying, will appear in 2017. . His fourth book, Dirt Angels, was published in 2009 by New Issues Press. In 2011 he was awarded a second fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a third Pushcart Prize. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Salmagundi, Prairie Schooner, Notre Dame Review, Crazyhorse, Ecotone, Black Warrior Review, Seneca Review, Southern Review and Best American Poetry, 2015. He is a professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University.
It’s raining again,
and Lucy, my daughter home from college for the summer,
is wearing her dead
grandmother’s powder blue raincoat. I use the yellow-handled
screwdriver
from the tackle box of tools my dead father-in-law gave me
as a wedding gift
to open a gallon of paint. In my dead father’s bible
with its spine cracked
I find Christ’s words, “Let the dead bury their dead:
but go thou
and preach the kingdom of God.” I eat oatmeal cooked with raisins
and diced Gala apples
from a clear glass bowl, the same my dead mother-in-law
once ate from.
The dead are gone, but they remain with us, shelter, aid,
instruct,
and feed us. They are as the smoke tree’s billowing filaments, ghostly
cotton candy, pink smoke
from the underground fire now hidden from us among the million
roots that still clutch
the dirt. Go thou and preach the sunlight upon smoke blossoms.
The wind
shakes them. They stay with us for this short season, but shall return
each year
more abundantly than the last. The cars downshift, go slow
past the blooming
smoke tree on Rainbow Drive, side street whose myriad cracks have been filled
with lines and loops
of black tar, erratic freehand spelling out grace and wonder
in indecipherable
ideograms that I must learn before I can begin to speak
again with the living.