I was saddened to read the obituary in today's Los Angeles Times about Debora Digges, the brilliant poet whom I met when she visited Claremont Graduate University to accept the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 1996.
She was a warm, humble person with an inviting smile whose writing had a profound effect on me. When the Tufts award judges announced her selection, I immediately bought a copy of her book "Rough Music" and devoured it. It had it all -- joy, despair and a keen perception of the frailty of our existence and of relationships. Her spirit was a like a beacon and she was an inspiration to me to write.
I read in the Los Angeles Times a few months ago that she was going to read her poetry in Pasadena. I wanted to go, but had a conflict and wish now I had made the time. Now she is among those many writers I admire who chose to take their leave from this life: Brautigan, Sexton, Foster Wallace. She will be missed, but her words and her spirit will live on:
Rough Music
by Deborah Digges
This is how it’s done.
The villagers surround the house,
beat pots and pans, beat shovels to drain spouts,
crowbars to shutters, rakes
raining rake tines on corrugated washtubs, or wire
whips, or pitchforks, or horseshoes.
At first they keep their distance
as if to wake you like blackbirds, though the birds
have long since fled, flown deep into the field.
And for a while you lie still, you stand it,
even smile up at your crimes
accompanying, each one, the sunrise stuttering across the ceiling
like the sounds within the sounds,
like lightning inside thrum-tink, woman-in-wood-shoes-fall-
down-wooden-stairs, like wrong-wrong inside rung-rung,
brick-smacking-brick housing ice-breaking-ice-
breaking-glass . . .
I mention this since this is what my dreams
are lately, rough music,
as if all the boys to women I have been, the muses, ghost-
girls and the shadows of the ancestors
circled my bed in their cheap accoutrements
and banged my silver spoons on iron skillets, moor
rock on moor rock, thrust yardsticks into the fans.
Though I wake and dress and try
to go about my day,
room to room to room they follow me.
By evening, believe me, I’d give back everything,
throw open my closets, pull out my drawers spilling my hoard
of dance cards, full for the afterlife,
but my ears are bleeding.
I’m trapped in the bell tower during wind,
or I’m the wind itself against the furious, unmetered,
anarchical applause of leaves late autumns
in the topmost branches.
Now the orchestra at once throws down its instruments.
The doors in the house of God tear off their hinges—
I’m the child's fist drumming its mother’s back,
rock that hits the skull that silences the martyr,
or I’m the martyr’s tongue cut out, fire inside fire,
clapper back to ore, ore into the mountain.
I’m gone, glad, empty, good
riddance, some shoulder to the sea, the likeness
of a wing, or the horizon, merely, that weird mirage, stone-
skipping moon, the night filled up with crows.
I clap my hands.
They scatter, scatter, fistful after
fistful of sand on water, desert for desert, far from here.
