After having completed her undergraduate degree in the English Department at BYU, Lindsey Webb went on to earn an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Utah. She has published two chapbooks—House and Perfumer’s Organ. Webb’s first full-length collection of poetry, Plat, appeared in 2024. Plat overlays linguistic play, personal narrative, and Mormon culture and history as coordinates in the endeavor to find orientation in the face of grief. Webb adds her voice to the slender but important roster of experimental writers in the Mormon tradition, charting the exciting and expansive terrain at the less traditional edges of both poetry and faith.
— Kimberly Johnson
Garden
Locke sank into a swoon;
The Garden died;
God took the spinning-jenny
out of his side.
—W. B. Yeats
Before you died, I confused the personal with the ecological, die with dye. Now I hold my mouth to the mouth of a tree and blow. Was I died here too, or did I born? I call the rabbits whatever comes into my head, though a pearly vapor rolls beneath the real. Deep fur behind a name.
Sitting in a garden, unsheltered from the moon’s ongoing description of the sun. A coyote walks up to a flowering pear and sticks her head in. Hibiscus spends at least part of the night describing the moon.
If heaven will one day arrive on earth, as Joseph Smith said, will it appear as a grid? If women don’t speak to God in heaven, what will they say when it falls to earth like a curtain? You float past me above the leaf duff, “clean” like a ghost, “clean” like a difficult vessel.
The garden is not a nightmare, it hallucinates itself each season. Where’s my dream and where’s my cultivation? Death or capital? I remember weedkiller was born of a man’s desire, so I can’t address my femininity in a garden. Too expensive. A $20 barrette at the corner of my face; a freak double-headed rose. Here every flower might be a rose.
The garden builds up the natural exactly as fast as it disintegrates. I read in my exercise book that with enough practice one can access the overtone sequence, “in which each frequency is an integer multiple of a fundamental.” Guitar music, violin music; there must be a quicker door. But this entire place aspires to allegory. The catalpa, too, with help from the fugitive wind, has decided to escape its plot.
Everywhere I plant theories about your death they come up several months later sticky and rotting from the inside with motive.
An apple tree painted on the wall looks like a plan. I walk over, as if to confront illustration. I pretend to cup the fruit in my hand and pull it back, pluck it from the tree, lift it into the third dimension. I drop it by relaxing my fingers. But the red fruit remains an argument kept closely to the wall, still red. My reply is overdrawn, and I reach out, attempt to pay again.
Winter comes to the garden, then fall, then summer. Hours construct themselves exactly as fast as they disintegrate. I came here to read and speculate but forgot how I got in. Ants imply distance to cover; death implies time has gone on without you; I should start over. Maybe I’ll go into real estate. You place your finger lightly on a string, and the garden hits a different octave. I put on a face like a window and walk around the plat. I’m waiting for the northern cardinal to catch his reflection in my countenance, to wear himself out fighting it.
There’s a middle and an end but no beginning. What they call the “pre-mortal existence.” Though I swear I saw you firmly in the beginning of the garden, bending to tell a secret to a tree.
What does your memory have to do with abstract space? When you were alive things were bad, regular. After surgery you came to me in the garden. I was digging, what, marigolds?, and you said “so this is happiness.”
Meanwhile the garden, firmly in a dead future. Meanwhile the end, stitched to a marigold, firmly post-mortal. You could tell when I was being sarcastic. You held your face, unrelenting, between.
In working the garden I’ve rinsed away the soft contours of my own faith, so that color is the only ornament. Texture’s catchy loss. Here there are no doors but little subdivisions, a sensation of the ancient on a plate. They tell me disgust comes only from the ground up, as if it weren’t ingested on the wing and left to shunt, tunneling under the gut. As if I didn’t come here with doubts.
Within days I sit in a circle talking, against a daylily. At first I chat about your young death, echoing the sentiment of a “new sisterhood,” as if the garden had no structure. Just a cloud of light. Then violet, fugitive scent, brings me to myself. They ask, “what can we do to prevent deaths like hers?” I stay quiet and scrape the plat. I find shafts, beams, I discover, what, a new luminescence? No; centipedes, reforming loss, lattice of rot and raw matter, nailed into planks. A pink wilderness of sod and infrastructure.
The garden tells its lie of isolation: “nature has died and the garden is its memory.” A blanket of cool irrigation settles in the corners of each leaf. Ghosts and rabbits, horned lizards, carpenter ants organize their respective diplomatic anarchism. I take a different path, almost running— disturbed by all the roses facing forward, as if I’d set them out myself.
When we were younger, I complained I had no sisters. You, taller and prettier, turned your darker hair around a finger. In a silly voice, you said: remember, I’m your sister.
Older, I forgot. I, forgetter.
An ant breathes, pauses. The ant thinks, and I think. I think the garden preserves the pages of books, rather than vice versa. The oil of flowers writes in empty loops, slow beneath the English. Before you died, I could imagine a book’s fourth dimension—the dimension of stain, skipper of pages. Now the ant enters a tunnel it built itself, and the garden rotates around it like a thread around a spool.
Another path unwinds, then splits.
I dig, mulch, prune, and fertilize; I don’t dig, mulch, prune, and fertilize. I grow you; I die you. In my dream I visit a time before your death, when nature generated itself from a spool of tiny spirals. Little white berries. I’m told the garden is wherever the righteous are, or vice versa; so at the felled catalpa I follow a vein of pollen, adopt a mastic attitude. I eat something that looks delicious but has no taste. Meanwhile, over my shoulder, a young woman sucks at the sap of a tree, bending as if permanently cast that way, shrouded in the blue light of archetype.
Even in shadow the garden’s washed and washed with color until it glows with a special kind of light, as if radiating from the category itself.
I find near the wall a pink-headed duck, taxidermied and on display away from direct light. Extinct pink. It’s difficult to describe the world from an outside position. Are there areas where pink rots? Little inlets where the natural pigment, exposed to light, has fled like a fugitive? I’m told these suggest some hybrid world.
The accident of ownership issues a market. Last year’s seed sprouts from a silo padlock. The problem of objects in the garden becomes not what they are, beneath their watery surfaces, but who husbands them. They tell me a tree has nothing to have; meanwhile I labor under the shade of reciprocity. Trim, mow, own. I imagine the world exactly as it is, then heaven as a grid overlaying it. Sin of omission instead.
They tell me the garden synonym, beauty. I tell them symmetthe right word is worms. They tell me to find a happy medium; I say the garden has no medium because it is not common. I mean not held in common. What I don’t tell them is that it keeps its fugitive unknowns beneath the topsoil. Its medium is elsewhere, cherished as a lost species.
At the split-leaf philodendron I turn left. Even the wilderness has us in it, as its off-stage opposite.
Meanwhile the kitchen takes its orders from the garden: tropics goes to temperate goes to tropics. In this way, agriculture asserts its regional dominance over my stomach. Nobody is in here except us, remember? And cultivation is coincident with desire. Spiced aromatic green herb sauce. Roseate squash, adrift in a pool of clear butter; fragrant and rapidly cooling.
The garden is not an allegory; it aspires to curl out. You told me you wanted to be buried young and beneath some tree. When you died the world turned sketchy, as I mistakenly thought the garden brooked no death. I forgot the coyote-head: trapped face-up in the grate, washed there by the spring floods, suspended by the jaw. And me, too—I say I will uncapture, but I eat and eat.
In meandering I become a bit of leaf matter, a hollow snail shell. Once I saw a young woman walk up to a scrub oak and put her mouth on it. Was it a kissing game, a couple transferring gum between their mouths? Did she murmur into the ear of the world? She looked like you—maybe you were practicing the flute, an instrument you never learned. Silent flute above the pretty sound of water.
The garden is not beautiful; it is totally unsuitable for the raising of temples. Its location is desolate and difficult to access. The dead release their new data every year: not easy. Not nothing. How I wish, sometimes, there were bunches of nothing. Snow falling on berries in a line of soft nos. I remember your old sentences strangled, tore, died quickly… then lashed out in opposite directions.
The garden follows its law of ornamentation; I follow a horticulture of logic. Purple stains all over my book. Dipping my thumb in a bowl, I write through the berry: loss is always inaugural. Crows hop around the garden, and I imagine sleeping in the earth until they die. Is it elegy or augury? I can’t quite read my own sentence. Is the garden dying or being born? Who husbands your memory? My writing hand, winter numb, drops out of the narrative—this is one example of the author’s failure to plot.
Let’s return to the eccentric square. Let’s fall back and regroup over lunch. You collect purple globes from the plum tree, and they melt tasteless on my palate. To what border did you flee, anthocyanin? A fucked-up building? Madder root, rot of the subject… I forget what I was saying. Here, economies of grids predominate; here there’s neglect and weird collapse. I walk on all fours in a cloud of surplus. I crawl in the interest of the dead.