Plat by Lindsey Webb

 

 

 

In Lindsey Webb’s debut collection, Plat, heaven is a place on earth. From the very beginning, we are confronted with Joseph Smith’s vision of a “celestial city on earth” — a community of grids and gardens, perfectly ordered, perfectly designed to contain a neat and tidy God. 

 

And yet. 

 

We begin in the garden, where our narrator tends the plat and insists: “the garden is not an allegory.” Not an allegory, and not nature, either. The narrator reports: “Nature has died and the garden is its memory.” 

 

What are we doing here in this husk of nature, husk of metaphor, where the fruit we eat “looks delicious but has no taste”? 

 

We have come here, we soon discover, to cultivate grief. To continually bury and unbury it. 

 

“I dig, mulch, prune, and fertilize; I don’t dig, mulch, prune, and fertilize. I grow you; I die you.”  

 

The grief we are growing is for the narrator’s childhood friend, a young woman whose death by suicide has shaken her entire spiritual community. The narrator, left behind, is now being asked to speak for her dead friend. To make sense of her death in the context of Mormon utopia. In Webb’s second poem, “Mancala,” she repeats: “They ask me to build a narrative of your death…” 

 

And she tries, word by word, sentence by sentence. Each line Webb writes is a brick in the building of that narrative. Here the form breaks, the lines are scattered across the page, the wind blows through them. Until finally, a more full truth is revealed: “They ask me to build a narrative of your death that exonerates them.” 

 

One source I read on the Mormon conception of the Garden of Eden reports: “According to Smith, the Garden of Eden was located in Jackson County, Missouri and following his expulsion from the Garden, Adam traveled northward to a place near modern-day Gallatin, Missouri.” 

 

And yet. If heaven is a place on earth, where is the spirit of this lost girl, this woman, the narrator’s friend? She’s not here, in the garden. The whole scene so stifling. Only worms and holes and rot. 

 

Perhaps heaven is a place on earth, and in heaven, like earth, women are trapped in a man’s vision of nature. His cultivation. Desperate to have a plot of their own. Desperate to speak to their dead. Many girls people these poems; with no way to speak to God, they put their mouths on trees. 

 

Webb asks: “Did she murmur into the ear of the planet?” 

 

Webb’s narrator is grasping for a motive that can make her friend’s death fit with the conception of heaven she’s been taught. She wanders through hallway after hallway, sentence after broken sentence. And in her grasping, she’s confronted only by her own reasons, motives she can make sense of. Uncertain, she returns to the facts. “I’ll describe what I see: heaven, a young woman with her back turned to the future, a little lesson.” 

 

What happens when you discover that in your community, the death of a person you love is just a “little lesson” we all must learn as we plough toward utopia? 

 

In Webb’s third poem, “House,” we approach the center of this claustrophobic Eden. Behind intricate latticework, in the center of the house, we find a spinning jenny, a machine which “allowed more threads and yarns to be produced by fewer spinners” (source). 

 

In this poem, the complexity of Webb’s language is a knot we try to untangle. Images within images within images. But the knot of grief is tight, resists understanding, and this house is not a safe place to make meaning. 

 

“Each night, the floors of the house rearrange.”

 

In the house there is still grief. But more than grief, the narrator is forced to confront herself. In the house, she is always walking through arches as if they will cleanse her of something she can’t precisely identify. As if she could find untouched land on which to craft a celestial city. Begin again in a new room.

 

This density of language, these knots, this whirring machine, all these carefully laid plans. Yet here is our narrator, howling through the walls. Her mouth to the glass, to the trees, to the ear of the dead. A coyote follows her, peeing on the floor, in the hallways, rolling in the soft grass of the garden. A coyote, who is the only mangy, imperfect, truly natural thing in this poem. A coyote who the narrator names as herself. 

 

Girl or coyote? Eden or rot? Either way, Webb’s narrator will not make sense of this loss. She will not build a narrative of this death. It remains an undigested, undigestible thing. She howls and howls to remember.