Her Own Words

W.S. MERWIN

Thinking of Deborah Digges

In the startling, beautiful, and unsparing title poem of her first collection, Vesper Sparrows, Deborah Digges follows, with an eye at once precise and visionary, two images. First, the sparrows themselves. She watches—she loves to watch—how they “sheathe themselves mid-air / shut wings and ride the light’s poor spine / to earth . . . ” She is seeing them in a city, New York, “just outside Bellevue’s walls” where they touch down “in gutters, in the rainbow / urine of suicides . . .” The suicides are the other image she traces through the poem: the various fortunes of their remains, and the unnamed and barely imaginable relations between them and the sparrows.
      The book was published in 1986, when she was thirty-six. That poem had appeared earlier in Antaeus. It seems likely that it was written when she was in her early thirties. By then she had been working at writing poems for ten years or more, with the clear commitment she brought to the things she cared about—the lives she cared about. She was, after all, the daughter of a cancer surgeon and had helped her father in the clinic when she was growing up, getting to see and take in, apparently, a good deal of what was going on there. Her father wanted all ten of his children to follow professional careers in medicine. Her upbringing is behind the assurance of “I have identified so many times that sudden / earnest spasm of the throat in children.” Earnest spasm.
      The aura of violence lingering around the unseen presence of what is left of the suicides, and around the urban landscape itself into which the forest birds have been hatched, takes shape in a few lines of reminiscence—in the first person, as in the lines about identifying “the sudden, earnest spasm in the throats of children.” That identification follows: “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.” A preview of the anonymity of the suicides.
      In the poem she is watching the sparrows at evening, at the hour of vespers, but the name is not merely a poetic ascription. They are known to ornithologists as the Eastern Vesper Sparrow (Pooecetes gramineus) marked with “the streaked siennas of a forest floor” and conspicuous white outer tail feathers, and she quotes with evident familiarity (by surname alone) one naturalist’s attempt to mimic in syllables the long tumbling rapids of the bird’s song. These birds are nesting in traffic lights, and “hundreds flock down” at evening to the piles of hospital garbage “for the last feed of the day”—a moment of ephemeral, wild survival.
      The other image from “Vesper Sparrows” is of “the ransacked cadavers” transported up the East River to Potter’s Field “as if they were an inheritance,” after they have been emptied of everything that could be saved, while the other parts have been “jarred and labeled, or incinerated”—their ashes “professing the virus that lives beyond the flesh.” And the relation between these remnants and the birds —where is it as she watches? In the leap from the ledge? Beyond identity in the garbage?
      I do not mean to suggest that the theme and imagery of this poem are typical of her poetry and of all her writing. That certainly is not so-—even though the next poem in this collection is “Laws of Falling Bodies,” in which she turns from a wondering, admiring recollection of accompanying her father on his inspections of post-mastectomy scars of his own patients, to a close look at the imprisoned Galileo timing the pulse in his groin all night by the pendulum of a swinging lamp. She writes, “Dawn moved in, whole and terrifying. / He’d hear the death carts begin in the streets,” and the Holy Office would make him “stand to watch the daily / executions in the sunblind courtyard / hoping he’d go mad with the next / navigation of the rack’s wheel.” “Instead,” she informs us, “he learned to love the body / for its genius of color, / the alizarin crimsons hooding the heart,” and she returns to the image of her father and the tenderness of his attention over the microscope and the way he touched the scars of the women on whom he had operated. She says, “to me it was a kind / of love he made, as he leaned over them . . .”
      That turn, that scope and breadth of view, are indications of the range of poetry that was to follow. There and in her two vivid memoirs, her variety and the integrity of her language are continuous. She can be comical, erotic, radiant, even though her prevailing tone is elegiac. She never repeats herself. By her fourth book, Trapeze, some of the poems, including the title poem, become haunted and haunting.
      But even in her first collection, the lines I have quoted from Vesper Sparrows present qualities that will typify her writing. Authority of tone, deliberate precision of language, and what appears to be openness and intimacy—a closeness at once to the subject and to the reader or the imaginary listener. Yet the poem and the life and death at its heart remain elusive, untouched, beyond knowledge. These qualities are clearly her own.
      They are also, of course, qualities of poetry itself: its mystery, its radiance, its enigmatic immediacy.

      I met her only once, before I had read anything she wrote. It was in the late seventies, in Seattle, soon after she and Stanley Plumly, her second husband, were together.  Beautiful woman, smiling, poised, quiet. I spoke to her later, or wrote to her, I believe, after the publication of each of her books of poems. I loved them from the moment I read them, and have always thought of hers as one of the unique gifts of a richly talented generation. But I have no sense of having known her. When I set down the telephone after a friend had told me, before the news broke, of her death, in that stunned moment I realized that what she had done was suddenly complete. Leaving us the words.

(Excerpted from Brick 84, used by permission of the author)