Red Door

by Donald Platt

Don Platt was one of my professors at Purdue. He was a great professor and writes beautiful poetry. This was recently featured on Poetry Daily. The formatting might get a bit screwed up but you can see it here as well.


How handsome my father
still is in that wallet-sized photo my 88-year-old mother
keeps by

the telephone! His thick black hair is parted on the left
and combed diagonally
to the right, so that it catches the light from the studio's

umbrella lamps
and glistens. He smiles wide. His cheeks rise. His large black eyes
gaze out

with a look meant only for my mother. He is dressed to kill
in his khaki
army shirt with a neatly knotted black tie and a small

gold cross
pinned to his collar, which means he's a chaplain in the Seabees
about to be sent

to Saipan and Okinawa, 1944. This is the man my mother first
met on the morning bus
to Santa Monica. She was answering an ad for a "room to let"

in a boarding house.
He had a day of leave and wanted to take a swim in the Pacific, stretch out
on his towel and watch

the pale-legged girls stroll by the mumbling surf. The two glanced shyly
at each other.
When they both boarded the evening bus back to L.A., they started talking.

Three weeks later they got married,
had a champagne breakfast with friends at her boarding house. Next morning
he shipped out. Sixty years

hurl by like bumper-to-bumper cars at 70 mph on the L.A. freeway.
My mother visits
my father on North Three, the nursing home's locked unit, every day.

Though he's forgotten
everyone else, he still remembers her. She kisses him full on his purple-blue lips,
which look as if

he's been drinking grape Kool-Aid on the sly.
It's his poor
circulation. When they kiss, his watery, hooded

lizard eyes
wake and glint for a moment like those of the young man in the photograph.
"Do you remember,"

she asks, "how we went all over England, France, and Italy on our
motorcycle?
Coventry, Carcassonne, Vézalay, Rome?" Those names brim

in her mouth, turn
to honeycomb. He shakes his head no. "We would go where the cars
couldn't. When the steep

cobblestone streets became stairs, we rode up the smooth gutters
on the sides.
Don't you remember?" He grins lopsidedly as if to apologize

for his stroke.
"It took you four years to finish your doctoral thesis on the first one hundred
years of the Church of England,

two volumes, one thousand sixty-four pages, with nineteen appendices!
You wrote about Jewel, Hooker,
Andrews, and Laud. Your tutor was Norman Sykes. He must be

dead now. But aren't
they all? That's history for you!" The three of us laugh
uncomfortably.

Suddenly my mother points to the watercolor on the wall.
She painted it
fifty-four years ago. It shows a woman with a child

walking by
a bright red door on a narrow English street. "That's where we used
to live. Remember

Number Two, Little St. Mary's Lane? The red door? The park? Our church?"
My father hesitates,
but only for a second, then says, "Of course I do. Who can forget

our red door?"
My mother smiles. I want to say that the past and the future are
a door like fire

we must walk through forward and backwards. Time is a room
we rent
by an ocean that fills our ears with the surf's susurrus and lamentation

morning, noon,
and night. We live and die in it. The lease is day-to-day. The small photograph
my mother keeps

by the telephone, on which my father will never call her again, is no illusion.
He always smiles
back at her. He is about to say something only she

hears. Their years together
are the morning bus, the evening bus. "Though you forget it all," she replies,
"that's what happened!"