Donald Platt
Origami
When I take our two daughters
to visit their grandmother, Martha is wearing her wig, sandy blonde
shot with silver,
blue slacks, a striped shirt. She’s sitting in her yellow
armchair
by the windows that look out on a grassy courtyard where now
a redbud, a crab apple,
and rows of tulips are in bloom. She’s propped up her swollen feet
on a black hassock.
She can’t get up easily, but offers one hand to each granddaughter
and smiles wide
as they bend to kiss her. They have grown into
young women
who study midwifery, anthropology, and organic chemistry.
They tell her
how good she looks. They’re right. Such a difference from last week
when Martha
said that all she wanted was to die. She lay
on her bed
under a thin sheet, knees drawn up to her chest,
while I kissed
her bald head. Now my daughters place the photo album in her lap
and show her
snapshots of herself at sixty, fifty, forty. Her wrinkles are washed
away, her hair
grows back thick and auburn, she coos over her newborn
granddaughters.
The years are pages we turn back easily. I turn them further,
farther back
to a group photo, taken by my father. There I am a small boy
sitting cross-legged on the ground
with my brother in his sailor suit and some kids I don’t remember
at the feet of adults
who must be dead by now. There’s tall Bill Slade and his wife, Janie,
in a paisley Liberty
silk scarf. But most of the dead are nameless. The old man
with the most amazing
warts and moles on his kind face—only his first name, Morris,
floats back.
Then his musty smell. The glamorous one in sunglasses,
pink dress,
and a long loop of pearls—all I know is she committed
suicide with sleeping pills.
My father’s former parishioners pose together in front of our
euonymus hedge,
eight feet tall
and just as deep. Its leaves are starting to turn to silent
tongues of fire.
Later, the hedge will be hacked down, its roots dug up. In the
casual snapshot
it still stands.
Mother, you will remain, never nameless to me
though you
be dead, this sunlight gone. My daughters make you origami
peacocks, frogs, ducks,
butterflies, dragonflies, geese, swans. They read the instructions aloud
from a book—fold
corner to corner, crease, unfold, reverse the fold—and suddenly
the sheet of paper
becomes a flying, jumping, or swimming thing. Outside in the courtyard
the crab apple
puts forth hand-folded petals. Each minute more origami
blossoms.
Look, Mother, my daughters and I are making you cranes. We fold
and unfold the flimsy
paper until wings, beaks, and feet appear. We blow into a small
hole on the underside
to inflate the body. To you we hold out paper shaped around our
breath.
The Garden
I push my mother
with her portable oxygen tank in a wheelchair through the garden
at her assisted living
home. The first warm day in May. She wants to see the flowers,
how the perennials
are doing. “Look,” she cries, “the black tulips, my favorite,
are still here!”
I push her past rows of other tulips, lily-flowering with pointed petals
curling out and down
so they resemble miniature court jester hats, whose parti-colored cones
weighed down with bells
flop and droop like spaniels’ ears. Inside the tulips’ wide
mute mouths,
I see the stamens reach out their black legs from each
three-lobed pistil
so that a fuzzy black widow waits and crouches at the center
of a silken bed. “Lilacs!”
my mother points to the empurpled, lavender blossoms bunched
like Concord grapes
and breathes in that intoxicating perfume, bouquet of spring’s
old vintage.
Last night she talked about the more than six hundred
watercolor landscapes
she’s painted and sold. “I wanted to express something of nature’s
beauty,” she told me.
“Of course, it doesn’t matter now. I haven’t painted
in three years.”
Now she turns to music. Last night it was Elgar’s Violin Concerto.
I had to raise
the volume so she could hear the softer solo
passages. When the full
orcchestra returned, it shook her two-room apartment. “See, the irises
about to bloom,” she says.
Sure enough, their tightly wrapped buds like chrysalises before
the blue
Morpho butterfly
breaks through and flies. Her death is the bank of indigo
irises that will
open soon. A week ago I visited the ramshackle, clapboard, crooked
cottage on Twin Lakes,
where she and my dead father lived out their retirement
for twenty-one years.
She sold the property to an investment banker and ultramarathon
runner, who built
a Tudor mansion so massive the foundation cracked.
It was condemned.
Finally, the contractor fixed it, but the banker is too busy
to visit
more than once or twice a year, take a twenty-mile
run, swim, and then
return to New York City. “The last time José and Trish came up,”
said Craig, their groundskeeper,
“was Thanksgiving.” They keep my parents’ cottage as a guesthouse.
Standing next to the mansion,
it looks like a dollhouse. I had told Craig my name and that my parents
used to live there.
“Your mother must be Martha!” he exclaimed. “I found a painting
of hers in the downstairs
bedroom’s closet. It was gathering dust. I cleaned it off
and hung it
in the kitchen so I can see it every morning.” He disappeared
inside and brought
it out. There, in its cheap, gold-colored, aluminum frame,
was the signed painting
I remembered from my childhood—a row of hay-thatched
stucco cottages
on a curving dirt road in England, where my parents had lived
for four years
before I was born. I loved that yellow thatch. “See, those houses
have long hair,”
I had once told my mother, “and no one makes them get a haircut!”
I held her painting
for a moment in both hands, then gave it back to Craig.
Pushing my mother’s
wheelchair, I tell her the story of Craig and her watercolor. “I watched
some workers thatch
those cottages,” she says. “I just had to paint that shaggy thatch!”
A day ago
I was taking photos of the graffiti on an iron bridge
over the flooded
Housatonic River. One message read—spray-painted in hot pink capitals,
one word per rusted
iron truss—AS IF KILLING TIME WOULDN’T INJURE
ETERNITY.
We are white water boiling over boulders. In the garden,
amid the red chorus
of azaleas’ hallelujahs, eternity is here, uninjured,
with us.