Wisteria
by Donald Platt
My mother comes back
as the mock orange’s white blossoms with yellow anthers, their faint
sweet scent
that the scant breeze blows to me. It’s flowering for the first time.
I sink my hands
into the dirt, get closer to the tap root of the huge dying elm
which spreads its black limbs
over me against blue sky in such eloquent gestures of grief
that I remain
kneeling in the flowerbed, weeding, staring up. Wisteria waits
in a black plastic
gallon bucket to be planted. My dead mother loved
the color of wisteria.
The white label calls it “wisteria frutescens—
Amethyst Falls”
and says its vines will grow 20 to 30 feet. I’m building it
a trellis,
two treated 4x4 posts anchored in concrete, set 12 feet apart
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 the one
illuminated letter of being.
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.
