R.I.P.Deborah Digges 1950-2009

Darwin's Finches
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.

Deborah Digges was the author of four collections of poetry. Her first book, Vesper Sparrows (1986), won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize. Late in the Millennium was released in 1989. Rough Music (1995) won the Kingsley Tufts Prize. Trapeze (2005) represented her most recent release. She was in the process of completing a fifth volume of poetry that had been scheduled for publication in the fall. Digges also wrote two compelling memoirs, Fugitive Spring (1991) and The Stardust Lounge (2001). In 1995 Digges translated Ballad of the Blood, poems by Cuban dissident poet Maria Elena Cruz Varela. Additionally, she had been the recipient of a number of impressive honors, including grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.