Trapeze By Deborah Digges

I posted this a year ago, but it's one of my favorite poems, so I'm reposting it on this fecund, rainy first full day of Spring.  My flowers are blooming wildly. The bulbs I planted have every single one come up, eagerly, a miracle.  I also recommend an amazing book of beautiful poetry, "Cloud Pharmacy" by Susan Rich. When I first bought it, I sat and read it straight through.

Happy International Poetry Day. Read a lot of poetry today and every day.

Blessings,
Marion 🌷🌹🌻🌺🌼



Trapeze
by Deborah Digges

See how the first dark takes the city in its arms
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.

O, the dying are such acrobats.
Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,

or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.
But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening,

diving, recovering, balancing the air.
Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings,

wind from revolving doors or currents off the river.
Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.

Don't call them back, don't call them in for supper.
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky. 

from:  Trapeze

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"What I am is all that I can carry." ~ Deborah Digges

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"We are what we don't throw away," ~Daniel, Rectify (Act As If, Season 2, Episode 5)

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Trapeze by Deborah Digges

Jetstream 'dragonfly' in my neighborhood last summer

 

 

TRAPEZE

By Deborah Digges, 1950 - 2009

 

See how the first dark takes the city in its arms 
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future. 

O, the dying are such acrobats. 
Here you must take a boat from one day to the next, 

or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand. 
But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening, 

diving, recovering, balancing the air. 
Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings, 

wind from revolving doors or currents off the river. 
Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher. 

Don’t call them back, don’t call them in for supper. 
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.

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Trapeze and Doors of My Heart by Poet, Deborah Digges

Trapeze
by Deborah Digges

See how the first dark takes the city in its arms
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.

O, the dying are such acrobats.
Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,

or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.
But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening,

diving, recovering, balancing the air.
Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings,

wind from revolving doors or currents off the river.
Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.

Don't call them back, don't call them in for supper.
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.

from:  Trapeze

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Doors of My Heart
by Deborah Digges

The wind blows
through the doors of my heart.
It scatters my sheet music
that climbs like waves from the piano, free of the keys.
Now the notes stripped, black butterflies,
flattened against the screens.
The wind through my heart
blows all my candles out.
In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy.
From the mantle smashes birds’ nests, teacups
full of stars as the wind winds round,
a mist of sorts that rises and bends and blows
or is blown through the rooms of my heart
that shatters the windows,
rakes the bedsheets as though someone
had just made love. And my dresses
they are lifted like brides come to rest
on the bedstead, crucifixes,
dresses tangled in trees in the rooms
of my heart. To save them
I’ve thrown flowers to fields,
so that someone would pick them up
and know where they came from.
Come the bees now clinging to flowered curtains.
Off with the clothesline pinning anything, my mother’s trousseau.
It is not for me to say what is this wind
or how it came to blow through the rooms of my heart.
Wing after wing, through the rooms of the dead
the wind does not blow. Nor the basement, no wheezing,
no wind choking the cobwebs in our hair.
It is cool here, quiet, a quilt spread on soil.
But we will never lie down again.

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"Poet, Deborah Digges, a renowned poet and memoirist whose work often sprang from private adversity, died on April 10, 2009 near Amherst, Mass., apparently in a suicide. She was 59 and lived in Amherst.

Ms. Digges apparently jumped from an upper level of the Warren P. McGuirk Alumni Stadium, on the campus of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  She was found on the ground outside the stadium and taken to Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Mass., where she was pronounced dead."  from:  "The New York Times", 4/16/09

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