The Wind Blows through the Doors of My Heart: Poems

the wind blows 

through the doors of my heart

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 my 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.

the birthing

Call out the names in the procession of the loved.

Call from the blood the ancestors here to bear witness

to the day he stopped the car,

we on our way to a great banquet in his honor.

In a field a cow groaned lowing, trying to give birth,

what he called front leg presentation,

the calf come out nose first, one front leg dangling from his

     mother.

A fatal sign he said while rolling up the sleeves

of his dress shirt, and climbed the fence.

I watched him thrust his arms entire

into the yet-to-be, where I imagined holy sparrows scattering

in the hall of souls for his big mortal hands just to make way.

With his whole weight he pushed the calf back in the mother

and grasped the other leg tucked up like a closed wing

against the new one’s shoulder.

And found a way in the warm dark to bring both legs out

into the world together.

Then heaved and pulled, the cow arching her back.

Until a bull calf, in a whoosh of blood and water,

came falling whole and still onto the meadow.

We rubbed his blackness, bloodying our hands.

The mother licked her newborn, of us oblivious,

until it moved a little, struggled.

I ran to get our coats, mine a green velvet cloak,

and his tuxedo jacket, and worked to rub the new one dry

while he set out to find the farmer.

When it was over, the new calf suckling his mother,

the farmer soon to lead them to the barn,

leaving our coats just where they lay

we huddled in the car.

And then made love toward eternity,

without a word drove slowly home. And loved some more.

a man like this

That summer he and my brothers

unload rusty barrels on the hill above the lake,

the barrels to be filled with air from a compressor

mostly on the blink to buoy up the dock

that’s sagging, starboard, almost sunk.

It’s a long enterp

The final, posthumous collection of poems by Deborah Digges: rich stories of family life, nature’s bounty, love, and loss—the overflowing of a heart burdened by grief and moved by beauty.

When Deborah Digges died in the spring of 2009, at the age of fifty-nine, she left this gathering of poems that captures a stunning gift that prevailed to the end. Here are poems that touch on her rural Missouri childhood in a family with ten children (“Oh what a wedding train / of vagabonds we were who fell asleep just where we lay”); the love between men and women as well as the devastation of widowhood (“love’s house she goes dancing her grief-stricken dance / for his unpacked suitcases, . . . his closets of clothes where I crouch like a thief”); the moods of nature that schooled her (“A tree will take you in so you see maze, / riot of needles star burst, the white pine grown through sycamore”); and throughout, touching all subjects, the call to poetry itself.

We are pulled forward by our hair

to be anointed in the barren garden.

I want the dark back, the bloody well of it,

my face before the fire,

or lie alone on the cold stone and find a way

to sleep awhile, wake clear and wander.

From “Write a Book a Year”

This breathtaking collection of poems by Deborah Digges, published posthumously, brings us rich stories of family life, nature’s bounty, love, and loss—the overflowing of a heart burdened by grief and moved by beauty.

When Deborah Digges died in the spring of 2009, at the age of fifty-nine, she left this gathering of poems that returns to and expands the creative terrain we recognize as hers. Here are poems that bring to life her rural Missouri childhood in a family with ten children (“Oh what a wedding train / of vagabonds we were who fell asleep just where we lay”); the love between men and women as well as the devastation of widowhood (“love’s house she goes dancing her grief-stricken dance / for his unpacked suitcases, . . . / . . . / his closets of clothes where I crouch like a thief”); and the moods of nature, which schooled her (“A tree will take you in, flush riot of needles light burst, the white pine / grown through sycamore”). Throughout, touching all subjects, either implicitly or explicitly, is the call to poetry itself.

The final work from one of our finest poets, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart is a uniquely intimate collection, a sustaining pleasure that will stand to remind us of Digges’s gift in decades to come.

Deborah Digges was born and raised in Missouri. She is the author of four previous collections of poetry and two memoirs. The recipient of grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, Digges lived in Massachusetts, where she was a professor of English at Tufts University, until her death in 2009.