United States, (1950-2009)
WINTER BARN
- A light slant snow dragging the fields, a counterwind
- where the edges of the barn frayed worlds,
- blurred outside in. This is what my love could give me
- instead of children — the dusk as presence, moth-like,
- and with a moth’s dust-colored flickering stall by stall,
- some empty now, certain gone to slaughter, driven north
- in open trucks over potholed, frozen roads.
- Such a hard ride to bloodlet, blankness, the stalls’ stone
- floors hosed out, yet damp, the urine reek not quite
- muffled with fresh hay, trough water still giving back lantern
- light like ponds at nightfall. Sheep lay steaming, cloud
- in cloud. The barn cat slept among last summer’s lambs, black
- faced, apart, relieved of their mothers. We made our way,
- my dogs and I, to say hello to the Yorkshire sow
- named Kora, who heaved herself up to greet us,
- let the dogs lick her oiled snout smeared with feed
- while I scratched her forehead. Kora of the swineherds
- fallen with Persephone, perhaps in hell a bride’s only company.
- Prodigal, planetary, Kora’s great-spined, strict-bristled body
- wore the black mud of a cold, righteous creation,
- burrs and mugwort plastered at the gates.
- Days her smell stayed with us. The last time we saw her
- the plaque bearing her name was gone. Maybe she would be mated.
- Sparrows sailed the barn’s doomed girth, forsaken,
- therefore free. They lit on rafters crossing the west windows
- that flared at sunset like a furnace fed on stars.
About the Poet:
Deborah Digges, United States, (1950-2009), poet, memoirist, and educator. She received degrees from the University of California and the University of Missouri, as well as an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was a professor of English at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., outside Boston, where she had taught since 1986. She also taught in the graduate writing divisions of New York University, Boston University, and Columbia University.
The author of four well-received poetry collections and two equally well-received memoirs, Digges poetry includes: Rough Music (1995), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Prize, and most recently The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart (2010). Her first book, Vesper Sparrows (1986), won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize from New York University. Digges wrote two memoirs, Fugitive Spring (1991) and The Stardust Lounge (2001).
Her poems were widely anthologized and appeared regularly in The New Yorker and other publications. Digges received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. [DES-07/22]
Great poem.