Darwin's Finches

Deborah Digges - 1950-2009

1 
My mother always called it a nest, 
the multi-colored mass harvested

from her six daughters' brushes, 
and handed it to one of us

after she had shaped it, as we sat in front 
of the fire drying our hair.

She said some birds steal anything, a strand 
of spider's web, or horse's mane,

the residue of sheep's wool in the grasses 
near a fold

where every summer of her girlhood 
hundreds nested.

Since then I've seen it for myself, their genius—
how they transform the useless.

I've seen plastics stripped and whittled 
into a brilliant straw,

and newspapers—the dates, the years—
supporting the underweavings.


2 
As tonight in our bed by the window 
you brush my hair to help me sleep, and clean

the brush as my mother did, offering 
the nest to the updraft.

I'd like to think it will be lifted as far 
as the river, and catch in some white sycamore,

or drift, too light to sink, into the shaded inlets, 
the bank-moss, where small fish, frogs, and insects

lay their eggs. 
Would this constitute an afterlife?

The story goes that sailors, moored for weeks 
off islands they called paradise,

stood in the early sunlight 
cutting their hair. And the rare

birds there, nameless, almost extinct, 
came down around them

and cleaned the decks 
and disappeared into the trees above the sea.

I can bless a death this human, this leaf the size of my hand. From the life-line spreads a sapped, distended jaundice toward the edges, still green. I've seen the sick starve out beyond the grip of their disease. They sleep for days, their stomachs gone, the bones in their hands seeming to rise to the hour that will receive them. Sometimes on their last evening, they sit up and ask for food, their faces bloodless, almost golden, they inquire about the future. * One August I drove the back roads, the dust wheeling behind me. I wandered through the ruins of sharecrop farms and saw the weeds in the sun frames opening the floorboards. Once behind what must have been an outhouse the way wild yellow roses bunched and climbed the sweaty walls, I found a pile of letters, fire-scarred, urinous. All afternoon the sun brought the field to me. The insects hushed as I approached. I read how the world had failed who ever lived behind the page, behind the misquoted Bible verses, that awkward backhand trying to explain deliverance. * The morning Keats left Guys Hospital's cadaver rooms for the last time, he said he was afraid. This was the future, this corning down a stairway under the elms' summer green, passing the barber shops along the avenue that still performed the surgeries, still dumped blood caught in sand from porcelain washtubs into the road-side sewer. From those windows, from a distance, he could have been anyone taking in the trees, mistaking the muse for this new warmth around his heart—the first symptom of his illness—that so swelled the look of things, it made leaves into poems, though he'd write later he had not grieved, not loved enough to claim them.

It fell to me to tell the bees, though I had wanted another duty— to be the scribbler at his death, there chart the third day's quickening. But fate said no, it falls to you to tell the bees, the middle daughter. So it was written at your birth. I wanted to keep the fire, working the constant arranging and shifting of the coals blown flaring, my cheeks flushed red, my bed laid down before the fire, myself anonymous among the strangers there who'd come and go. But destiny said no. It falls to you to tell the bees, it said. I wanted to be the one to wash his linens, boiling the death-soiled sheets, using the waters for my tea. I might have been the one to seal his solitude with mud and thatch and string, the webs he parted every morning, the hounds' hair combed from brushes, the dust swept into piles with sparrows' feathers. Who makes the laws that live inside the brick and mortar of a name, selects the seeds, garden or wild, brings forth the foliage grown up around it through drought or blight or blossom, the honey darkening in the bitter years, the combs like funeral lace or wedding veils steeped in oak gall and rainwater, sequined of rent wings. And so arrayed I set out, this once obedient, toward the hives' domed skeps on evening's hill, five tombs alight. I thought I heard the thrash and moaning of confinement, beyond the century, a calling across dreams, as if asked to make haste just out of sleep. I knelt and waited. The voice that found me gave the news. Up flew the bees toward his orchards.

My life's calling, setting fires. Here in a hearth so huge I can stand inside and shove the wood around with my bare hands while church bells deal the hours down through the chimney. No more woodcutter, creel for the fire or architect, the five staves pitched like rifles over stone. But to be mistro-elemental. The flute of clay playing my breath that riles the flames, the fire risen to such dreaming sung once from landlords' attics. Sung once the broken lyres, seasoned and green. Even the few things I might save, my mother's letters, locks of my children's hair here handed over like the keys to a foreclosure, my robes remanded, and furniture dragged out into the yard, my bedsheets hoisted up the pine, whereby the house sets sail. And I am standing on a cliff above the sea, a paper light, a lantern. No longer mine to count the wrecks. Who rode the ships in ringing, marrying rock the waters storm to break the door, looked through the fire, beheld a clearing there. This is what you are. What you've come to.

Poems

Darwin's Finches

More by Deborah Digges

The Leaves

Telling the Bees

My Life's Calling

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Darwin's Finches

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