Deborah Digges

I love to watch them sheathe themselves mid-air, shut wings and ride the light’s poor spine to earth, to touch down in gutters, in the rainbowed urine of suicides, just outside Bellevue’s walls. From in there the ransacked cadavers are carried up the East River to Potter’s Field as if they were an inheritance, gleaned of saveable parts, their diseases jarred and labeled, or incinerated, the ashes of metastisized vision professing the virus that lives beyond the flesh in air ... The first time I saw the inside of anything alive, a downed bird opened cleanly under my heel. I knelt to watch the spectral innards shine and quicken, the heart-whir magnify. And though I can’t say now what kind of bird it was, nor the season, spring or autumn, what dangerous transition, I have identified so many times that sudden earnest spasm of the throat in children, or in the jaundiced faces of the dying, the lower eye-lids straining upward. Fear needs its metaphors. I’ve read small helplessnesses make us maternal. Even the sparrows feel it, nesting this evening in traffic lights. They must have remembered, long enough to mate, woods they’ve never seen, but woods inbred up the long light of instinct, the streaked siennas of a forest floor born now into the city, the oak umbers, and the white tuft of tail feathers like a milkweed meadow in which their song, as Burroughs heard it, could be distinguished: come-come-where-where-all-together- down-the-hill ...

Inside the starboard window of his room in a boat at sea, the piece of earth he's scraped from a dead gull’s leg sprouts eighty different species, green under bell glass. By the sunlight of the oil lamp he makes rain as the wind picks up toward Chiloe, Port Famine, Concepcion, and then Galapagos. Here he finds shipwrecked sailors’ epitaphs cut into the shell of an old tortoise who’s tame enough to ride, too huge to slaughter. Here the birds are fearless. He can catch them with his hands, let them perch on his finger before he breaks their necks and wraps them in his shirt and sets their eggs on branches drifting from the shoreline, island to island. Now everywhere he meets himself. He’s tired, and half the world from home. But his mind has entered the morning the way all the animals kept in his cabin in jars along the wall grow smaller in sequence until the window opens on the sea, so that what he’ll remember are the wasted spaces, the desert rock spread out for miles as if the earth were flat again, dangerous at the horizon, where the stones, piled, shine against lava black. Dew pools in the evenings. A few pale leaves appear.