At the Red Light

At the Red Light:

                Drops of Water

                On the Driver’s Side Window

All steeples are upside down

in the drops of rain on the window

and they multiply and they are many

bending shapes: and see how they make

balloon animals!  Can’t you

see a man clowning around with the limp

rubber wiener and how

he’s practiced holding it

randily, the bounce of his rhythm... it makes me

wonder if when he was first getting used

to thinking he might like to take up

entertaining a crowd with make believe

he stood before a reflecting glass

to catch the sass of his real wish and he’d add

act after act, gesture this,

subtle that, the rubber blown

to near popping, blown and popping

too full of him: until he learned the burst

of the bang was one of the challenges

he could push back on to the crowd, he could

control their own breath and the throb

of their heart, how he could have them

riveted to the twists in his hands

and rubs and squeaks and tipoffs and come

to what it all will be: the legs the torso

the ears and viola! it’s a long

necked giraffe or maybe a green alligator.

Or a pucker with that tied-off end

of a flower…and yes, all this right?

from one and one and one drop of rain falling

on the window, the tilted spire

in its curve, how maybe the only other

time it leaned that way was when

it was being erected, the steeple-

jack's asked his opinion and consulted the crane

to take the strain of the pullies instead of the men

yelling all their Saturday afternoon

expletives.  To think it could all come down

spire first but finally up it falls

into the heaven it was erected

to point to, nailed to the roof, all

tower housing and a tired set

of bells that have their go in betrothing 

the ears and spirit...but only after the fall

carnival and ox pulls and tent

events and extra fees in the back

for all the men and boys wink wink nod nod.

And judgments need to rest (tell me I'm wrong)

in the paw of a small boy sleeping

next to his deminishing-even-as-he-breathes

blue twisted balloon that makes me want

to wake him before it goes

flat as a sermon on a rainy morning, 

a thousand spires hard, still rising,

while the men yet to repent their sins drive on

before the light turns green.

Other Than: What Are Brooms For?

“Shall I Make Sense Or Shall I Tell the Truth?  
I'm Not Sure I Can Do Both
With This”

Mercy’s at best approximate,

like the first weeks of blindness

before the other senses' stunned quartet have learned to translate

inside the skull’s black paradise

some recovery of touch, this odor of apples, sea wind,

hearth-fire, this prophecy

of rain or danger,

this autumn of spring dryness in the leaves.

               

                                                                Deborah Digges

                                                                Late Summer

Opening you, I am remembering I had been dreaming

about a woman.  She was gentle and she waited a while but I was still

afraid, a long wave of unfinished afraid, but in time a going out wave.

I think I dreamed of doctors because earlier in the day I’d made

some comment about seeing only those who’d treat me

above the neck: and specific: the dentist and the optometrist.

Nothing but teeth, and then nothing but what I can

see.  Nothing but what I can chew and read.  I don’t think I’m unique.

In the dream, I never sat down and I mostly

looked away, and the room was a subtle grey:
hair just washed/just dried
soft, you know the kind, or fine as a new baby’s hair if we’re lucky

enough to be able to think back to that.  Mostly though,
and only after course examination, after taking it all down

and into the skin, after lesions, lacerations, and life-saving
stitches, my head has stood up enough to what’s

been offered: and now I know I go out

with my clavicle and scapula broad as the prow

of a small boat, used new and not new used if that’s possible
and it is if you think about sex.  And it's safe to say
you liked it and wanted to and made it an intimate
part of your life until your life wasn't anymore and that
is what makes me ache because I wanted to get to
know you and now I only can with these few
books.

I don’t know why, but I made myself read you lived now in Mass-

achusetts, I made myself read that, even though

I know you’re dead.  I’m not right now remembering

the year but that will be on another book,

your last, published posthumously I remember. 

And it is.  The tense is changed.  You still lived

in Massachusetts, (I put the still in, because what else

are you now?) until your death in 2009.

I’m looking for hints and realize I always have,

that offer me a reason you chose to fall

from high enough in the air that it killed you.

In “Broom” I read you’re sweeping, of course you’re sweeping

and really there’s a lot of power in making things

clean.  You take lovers and husbands and you make sons
with one of them.

You fuck the lovers and fuck up husbands
and fuck-up the sons. And you say this later, describing some of it wild

enough to gum your hair while you sweep and sweep

them with your body and your mouth, hoping, I know,
that the whole motion will be about getting you

clean.  Maybe I reach for you every fall because of all

the trees that are starting to let go of one another and yet
one more year and I was drawn

since the beginning by your keeping
from house to house and room to room, especially on
moving, broom:

because I've been this kind of movement too,
and I remember wanting to be in your hands as your straw
monument, longing from all that's bottled on the first time I saw it all on the line.

You were alive then.  I was drawn by ending my time

with a Buddhist community and dumping myself
back on your shore.

I opened you (and maybe you’d find this poetic and then dismiss

it as sentimental) and there was my friend, and a thin

slip of his beard that I almost brushed away.  It’s him,

it’s what wasn’t swept up it’s what wasn’t ignored.  Did you ever

save anything of what you tried to sweep away?

I look at it the way I try to look at the woman

in my dream, how I let the whole room go

soft, like an experienced deadlift athlete who imagines every muscle at the last

of it letting go the joint and going slack before they’re torn

to perform the most impossible, ludicrous task: 

thoughts

gate city church
nashua, nh

thoughts      thoughts      thoughts         thoughts        thoughts            thoughts              thoughts              thoughts              thoughts              thoughts              thoughts

t                 h                    o                             u                 g                      h             t             s             

Thoughts are drops of water falling

                on the driver’s side

                window: a pause at the red-light

                railroad crossing where say

                on a day like today

                the church steeple

                is upside down in the water

                whose shape makes me

                consider the pelvic girdle 

                —and because it all glides, 

                watch: that drop has a west-

                north-west wind pushing it

                in the belly. It could be

                a boxer bent over and all

                around her is her raining

                accumulation…see how certain

                windows of the church

                are stuck in their up-side down

                selves while they roll

                devotedly, and only just now

                to the edge, to fall off, maybe

                fall apart, maybe, or be

                held together

                on some other surface to be,

                maybe, expanded, maybe

                quivering for some time

alone before the sky

her heat and her shrouds

and her mensurable eunuch

call her back...my

how she’s different for

where she’s fallen, my

how she’s changed.