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.
Smoke Tree
Donald Platt Click to read more...
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.