THE SMALL DOOR OF YOUR DEATH

I sit on the sun porch of my home in New Iberia writing the review of a book about a tragic death, hoping that wherever the tortured soul of this addicted son in Sheryl St. Germain’s The Small Door of Your Death now resides, he’s no longer allergic to sunlight, as his grieving mother once supposed... and I pray that his mother no longer feels “night everywhere in me.”

This volume from the former Louisiana Writer of the Year, 2018, is a chronicle of St. Germain’s beloved son Gray’s death, by addiction and her subsequent grief —it is expressed in both tribute and lament…but does not fall into the realm of the maudlin. Surprisingly, St. Germain, like all mothers of addicts… perhaps like all mothers… gives voice to Dickinsonian hope that “never stops at all"; e.g., in “Feral”: “All you once hoped to be/still lights your face, though:/it is almost a holy light/you are trying to be a good man/you are trying to live in this world you hate/I love that you still care enough/to pretend to be/the one I named,/hoped to birth.”

In Section 3 of this volume, St. Germain tells the reader how a witnessing mother struggles with grief and her own addiction, literally stitching her fractured Self through sewing a blanket “of the most sumptuous yarns, each a/slightly different shade of gray: blue-gray, reddish-gray, silver gray, a/gray that’s almost black…and I wish I could have stitched your/wounds as confidently as I do this blanket…” St. Germain has developed a keen interest in textiles and quilt-making as part of her recovery from addiction and grief and recently visited Oaxaca City Mexico, where textile making flourishes, to help her further a second career in Textiles.

The 4th Section of The Small Door brings readers to an agonizing visualization of Sheryl viewing the body of her dead son, a dark place of realization:  “never again your body, never this vessel through which I knew you.” But she finds herself “In A Church Two Weeks After Your Death,” where she confesses, “I don’t believe, but here I am lighting a candle./She had a son too, I suddenly remember,/could do nothing/for his suffering.” Of all the Mary poems in the lexicon of poets, this one impressed me with its authentic voice, the voice of a suffering mother who is left with her son’s ashes and regrets. Here is acknowledgement of spiritual doubt, of a self-crucifixion without resurrection, again taking St. Germain to the place of “night everywhere in me.”

This volume doesn’t just trickle out and into mothers’ hearts; it touches a sometimes unexpressed deep sadness as in “Summer Solstice, 2015”: “Today, I’ll walk another day without you./I’ll carry you in me, like before you were born,/on these walks.” However, after her son has been dead seven months, in “At the Keukenhof*,” St. Germain finds resolution in viewing the color red where tulips remind her of her son’s laugh, and she expresses that she wishes she had brought him to this country she’s visiting because he had loved intensity and “would have felt it in these flowers…”

St. Germain’s “ode” to those tulips is the redeeming lyric in which she “step[s] into the sun/ step[s] into the light…” “See,” she writes, “I would have said, tulips that look like ballerinas,/fringed and frilled tulips, multi-colored parrot tulips, double peony tulips,/star-shaped tulips, lacy, open petals, thick, bold petals…” 

Here, in powerful, raw lyrics, a mother creates poetry from inevitable loss. Here, readers stand with her at the edge of a formidable chasm where she voices sadness, hope, despair, return to life, and, most of all, love. As I wrote in an e-mail to St. Germain: This collection of pain and passion reminds me of one of my own poems addressed to a daughter. “I am surprised at how agony/and tenderness/resemble one another."

*The Netherlands