Trapeze
Deborah Digges

See how the first dark takes the city in its arms

and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.

O, the dying are such acrobats.

Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,

or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.

But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening,

diving, recovering, balancing the air.

Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings,

wind from revolving doors or currents off the river.

Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.

Don't call them back, don't call them in for supper.

See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.

A nice evocation of the dead, something Digges well in several of her poems after the death of her husband. I particularly like

But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening,

which I think better avoids sentimentality than the last two lines do.

The poem is also a fine elegy for Digges herself, who committed suicide a few months ago.

Here are two more of her poems, one about her dying husband, a vet, and one about either her father or her husband --

THE BIRTHING by Deborah Digges

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 he 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.

SEERSUCKER SUIT by Deborah Digges

To the curator of the museum, to the exhibition of fathers,

to the next room from this closet of trousers

and trousers, full sail the walnut hangers of shirts,

O the great ghost ships of his shoes.

Through the racks and the riggings,

belt buckles ringing and coins in coat pockets

and moths that fly up from the black woolen remnants,

his smell like a kiss blown through hallways of cedar,

the shape of him locked in his burial clothes,

his voice tucked deep in his name,

his keys and the bells to his heart,

I am passing his light blue seersucker suit

with one grass-stained knee,

and a white shirt, clean boxers, clean socks, a handkerchief.

This hit me like a sock in the jaw--it seems to get the mood of a writer who has an intense sense of that all manner of gravity, both natural and moral, has ceased to exist that the material world and the conduct of the population was now free to play, wander , roam, let themselves go into a an vertiginous , all embrace void. These very much resembles Yeats, and the ringing rhetorical and hard edged images resound like "Easter 1916". The difference between the two, of course, is that Yeats' poem was a prophecy, and his poem was apprehensive because everything old was being made new with new uses, new meanings, remolded from a new philosophy. Terrible in the unknown and beautiful in the sense that life processes cannot be stopped, only made into something new , different. Digges gives the feeling of the floor, the sidewalk, the street giving way from under you , that the conditions of conduct are suspended or revoked outright, and that the life goes to an inevitable, ecstatic end.

Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.

Don't call them back, don't call them in for supper.

See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.

The nihlistic lure is overpowering here, and one is made to feel that there is nothing for this speaker to do but to surrender to natural forces, to embrace the inevitable end. The foreknowledge that every living thing dies finally crowds the poem like a Bosch painting--one last intense set of indulgences of the human senses, and then ride the sensual tide to a darkness one cannot report back from. This is beautiful, unnerving, slightly scary.

Sorry, Ted, I don't see that nihilism in Digges' poem as all. I think she's just indulging in an imaginative description of the dead, contrasting the ease of their existance with the diffciulties of our own existance. To me, she's not quite as whimsical as Addonizio in the following poem, but almost --

WHAT THE DEAD FEAR by Kim Addonizio

On winter nights, the dead

see their photographs slipped

from the windows of wallets,

their letters stuffed in a box

with the clothes for Goodwill.

No one remembers their jokes,

their nervous habits, their dread

of enclosed places.

In these nightmares, the dead feel

the soft nub of the eraser

lightening their bones. They wake up

in a panic, go for a glass of milk

and see the moon, the fresh snow,

the stripped trees.

Maybe they fix a turkey sandwich,

or watch the patterns on the TV.

It’s all a dream anyway.

In a few months

they’ll turn the clocks ahead,

and when they sleep they’ll know the living

are grieving for them, unbearably lonely

and indifferent to beauty. On these nights

the dead feel better. They rise

in the morning refreshed, and when the cut

flowers are laid before their names

they smile like shy brides. Thank you,

thank you, they say. You shouldn’t have,

they say, but very softly, so it sounds

like the wind, like nothing human.

Hi Ted, MaryAnn, so… Digges committed suicide by jumping off a football stadium. I wonder what was going on in her head? Her husband had died of cancer; four kids…career, books, prizes…this caught my attention: She was also working on a historical novel based on the life of Sarah Winchester.

Is this who they are talking about? I think so, that’s pretty spooky. I’ve been in San Jose on more than several occasions and have thought about taking a tour of the house, but I have yet to do it. Stairs leading up to a ceiling is somewhat bizarre.

What gets me in the poem is how it makes the Big Sleep, the Large Nod, the Humungus Nap an attractive state; life consists mostly of temporary problems requiring our wits and ingenuity with which to engineer remedies. It's a wearying task as the years go on, and Digges , it seems to me, writes from a point of view of someone approaching their nadir, the breaking point when what passes for ironic disengagement, the activity of minimizing one's labors in just getting through the day, becomes an encroaching obsession for a permanent solution . The narrator seems envious of the dead, as you say, but I think there's a real desire here to leave this sphere of being. The weightlessness and unboundedness of the dead suggests desire, a deferred longing . The narrator sounds like she is desireous of what the dead get to do in the universe as we understand it, which is nothing. The desire is to do nothing and to be nothing in turn.

In the darkest part of the evening, the dead can be barely seen. Nice. Spooky. The ship reference brought to mind the boatman ferrying souls into the underworld.

Hi Busta G,

Can you do the Thurs OPP next week, Sept. 24? Please respond to this post so I know you've seen it. Thanks.

MA

Kim Addonizzio's poem , if nothing else, is a sharp and funny rebuttal to the late Digges' poem. Unlike the narrator in "Trapeze", who all but says she envies the dead their inertia and seeming serenity, Addonizio's poem tells of us spectral traces of formerly corporeal beings who cannot severe their link with the physical world. It's funny in an odd way, as it mirrors the vanity of the living's obsession over status and the fear of not getting what they desire or losing what they think they have. Addonizio's point, after her brisk and crosscutting descriptions of spirits contending with various dis-pleasures and discomforts, is that we should make our peace before our time comes; otherwise the anxieties will follow us in the crossing over to the other side and cause us to stall before we reach the place of fabled Eternal Rest. It seems Addonizio sees this state analogous to being stuck at the snarkiest intersection for all time. A drag.

I cannot understand the relationship of the first two lines of this poem to the rest of them. I humbly submit that it would be a better poem without those first two lines, which seem to divert us from the real intent, besides which O the dying are such acrobats is a great way to open a poem (reminding me, for some reason, of cummings).

From my perspective, the poem is not an exultation of death and nothingness, as Ted suggests, but rather a cautionary tale. It is indeed 'scary' as Ted and others advise, but precisely because it first describes death and the dead with such child-like wonderment, only to conclude, in those last two most powerful lines that you should not invite them to dinner, that they will leave scuff marks, which is to say that you should not invite your memories of loved ones into moments forward if you can avoid it, that they do leave marks on you that are hard to dispose of or ignore.

It seems that others are reading this as a predictor of the author's eventual suicide while I read it as a lamentation for loss.

I find this to be, in light of the biographical info supplied, a remarkably strong love letter.

Take care.

Joe

Joe Soccerfreak!!!! Welcome back!!!! I missed you.

: - ))

I agree that Ted seems to be reading "Trapeze" as an indicator of Digges' suicide. But I also agree with you that it should, instead, be read as a love letter to her deceased husband.

(and I'm not just doing all this agreeing because you're back.....)

MA

See how the first dark takes the city in its arms
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.

I liked the way these two lines established what I thought was the mood of the poem, a telling reference to the quickness with which death visits us; it is radical interruption in our lives, an event many think about only in the abstract, something still pending in the far future. Our narrator is perhaps mourning a loss and desiring a relief from the task of attempting to construct another reason for staying alive after her mate had gone. Her life seems empty as a result and she marvels at the effortless , seamless state of death provides to the departed namesakes. Hers was , perhaps, a choice between states of nothingness--one being lashed to earth, full of tasks, burdens, obligations, all bereft of greater , redeeming purpose, the other merely a blankness overall, complete non being.

Comparing the work that each (Winchester and this poet) created in response to thoughts of death is dizzying. Winchester, haunted by the ghosts of American Indians killed by the rifles which brought her fabulous wealth, thought to evade death by continuing work on her house, 24 hours a day for years. Digges' poem is strikingly beautiful, and contrastingly fearless. Uh, folks is funny.

Uh, folks is funny

I don't understand this comment, falcon.

Do you still want to be in the Thurs OPP rotation??

This is very much to my taste. I’m such a middlebrow; I’m a sucker for high moral and aesthetic standards.

I’m reticent (for once) to start analyzing because I believe (for me) a poem as good as this should be allowed to reveal itself at its own pace through its beauty (there, I said it) and feeling, at least at first. Maybe it’s just a hint of Autumn in the air, getting to me. As HAP might put it: <link>

I can’t resist mentioning, though, the way the poem moves through, and finally beyond, comparisons: yesterday/future, one day/the next, eternity/evening, seabirds/starlings (sea/stars maybe), to an equation: higher/higher.

But wait a minute: eternity/evening? What about morning? I guess morning won’t be back.

I sense a kinship to Rilke’s Duino Elgies. Thanks for posting this; it really raises my spirits.