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: