{"product_id":"the-wind-blows-through-the-doors-of-my-heart-isbn-9780375711701","title":"The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart","description":"Now in paperback, the final, posthumous collection of poems by Deborah Digges: rich stories of family life, nature's bounty, love, and loss--the overflowing of a heart burdened by grief and moved by beauty.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e When Deborah Digges died in the spring of 2009, at the age of fifty-nine, she left this gathering of poems that captures a stunning gift that prevailed to the end. Here are poems that speak of her rural Missouri childhood in a family with ten children; the love between men and women as well as the devastation of widowhood; the moods of nature; and throughout, touching all subjects, is the call to poetry itself.DEBORAH DIGGES was the author of five collections of poems, for which she won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize from New York University and the Kingsley Tufts Prize, and two memoirs. The recipient of grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, Digges lived in Massachusetts, where she was a professor of English at Tufts University until her death in 2009.\u003cb\u003ethe wind blows \u003cbr\u003ethrough the doors of my heart\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe wind blows\u003cbr\u003ethrough the doors of my heart.\u003cbr\u003eIt scatters my sheet music\u003cbr\u003ethat climbs like waves from the piano, free of the keys.\u003cbr\u003eNow the notes stripped, black butterflies,\u003cbr\u003eflattened against the screens.\u003cbr\u003eThe wind through my heart\u003cbr\u003eblows all my candles out.\u003cbr\u003eIn my heart and its rooms is dark and windy.\u003cbr\u003eFrom the mantle smashes birds’ nests, teacups\u003cbr\u003efull of stars as the wind winds round,\u003cbr\u003ea mist of sorts that rises and bends and blows\u003cbr\u003eor is blown through my rooms of my heart\u003cbr\u003ethat shatters the windows,\u003cbr\u003erakes the bedsheets as though someone\u003cbr\u003ehad just made love. And my dresses\u003cbr\u003ethey are lifted like brides come to rest\u003cbr\u003eon the bedstead, crucifixes,\u003cbr\u003edresses tangled in trees in the rooms\u003cbr\u003eof my heart. To save them\u003cbr\u003eI’ve thrown flowers to fields,\u003cbr\u003eso that someone would pick them up\u003cbr\u003eand know where they came from.\u003cbr\u003eCome the bees now clinging to flowered curtains.\u003cbr\u003eOff with the clothesline pinning anything, my mother’s \u003cbr\u003e     trousseau.\u003cbr\u003eIt is not for me to say what is this wind\u003cbr\u003eor how it came to blow through the rooms of my heart.\u003cbr\u003eWing after wing, through the rooms of the dead\u003cbr\u003ethe wind does not blow. Nor the basement, no wheezing,\u003cbr\u003eno wind choking the cobwebs in our hair.\u003cbr\u003eIt is cool here, quiet, a quilt spread on soil.\u003cbr\u003eBut we will never lie down again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ethe birthing\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCall out the names in the procession of the loved.\u003cbr\u003eCall from the blood the ancestors here to bear witness\u003cbr\u003eto the day he stopped the car,\u003cbr\u003ewe on our way to a great banquet in his honor.\u003cbr\u003eIn a field a cow groaned lowing, trying to give birth,\u003cbr\u003ewhat he called \u003ci\u003efront leg presentation,\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe calf come out nose first, one front leg dangling from his \u003cbr\u003e     mother.\u003cbr\u003eA fatal sign he said while rolling up the sleeves\u003cbr\u003eof his dress shirt, and climbed the fence.\u003cbr\u003eI watched him thrust his arms entire\u003cbr\u003einto the yet-to-be, where I imagined holy sparrows scattering\u003cbr\u003ein the hall of souls for his big mortal hands just to make way.\u003cbr\u003eWith his whole weight he pushed the calf back in the mother\u003cbr\u003eand grasped the other leg tucked up like a closed wing\u003cbr\u003eagainst the new one’s shoulder.\u003cbr\u003eAnd found a way in the warm dark to bring both legs out\u003cbr\u003einto the world together.\u003cbr\u003eThen heaved and pulled, the cow arching her back.\u003cbr\u003eUntil a bull calf, in a whoosh of blood and water,\u003cbr\u003ecame falling whole and still onto the meadow.\u003cbr\u003eWe rubbed his blackness, bloodying our hands.\u003cbr\u003eThe mother licked her newborn, of us oblivious,\u003cbr\u003euntil it moved a little, struggled.\u003cbr\u003eI ran to get our coats, mine a green velvet cloak,\u003cbr\u003eand his tuxedo jacket, and worked to rub the new one dry\u003cbr\u003ewhile he set out to find the farmer.\u003cbr\u003eWhen it was over, the new calf suckling his mother,\u003cbr\u003ethe farmer soon to lead them to the barn,\u003cbr\u003eleaving our coats just where they lay\u003cbr\u003ewe huddled in the car.\u003cbr\u003eAnd then made love toward eternity,\u003cbr\u003ewithout a word drove slowly home. And loved some more.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ea man like this\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat summer he and my brothers\u003cbr\u003eunload rusty barrels on the hill above the lake,\u003cbr\u003ethe barrels to be filled with air from a compressor\u003cbr\u003emostly on the blink to buoy up the dock\u003cbr\u003ethat’s sagging, starboard, almost sunk.\u003cbr\u003eIt’s a long enterprise that will take days\u003cbr\u003eof sinking barrels in the shallows,\u003cbr\u003erolled out half full of water, to the hull.\u003cbr\u003eMy brothers dive and struggle,\u003cbr\u003edrumming their heads and elbows\u003cbr\u003ewhere the jack cranks up the far left corner,\u003cbr\u003ethen treading water, shaking heads\u003cbr\u003eand spouting as men do in grand productions\u003cbr\u003eof hard work, their little sisters watching,\u003cbr\u003edrown the barrel, hoist it up between the beams.\u003cbr\u003eNow the compressor’s hose so many times wrapped\u003cbr\u003eround with plumber’s tape,\u003cbr\u003estuck in the barrel, hisses out the muck,\u003cbr\u003ethe remnant water, oil and stink.\u003cbr\u003eMy brothers wear my father’s surgeon’s masks\u003cbr\u003eas if that helps. And so it goes,\u003cbr\u003ethis or some other year, except today\u003cbr\u003ehigh on the hill one barrel tilts, set down\u003cbr\u003esideways on its own lid, perhaps,\u003cbr\u003eand pitches, beating down the hill toward children\u003cbr\u003ein a playpen, children in the shallows playing, mother\u003cbr\u003e     shouting.\u003cbr\u003eWhat does my father do but leap over the hill\u003cbr\u003eand fly a moment, airborne over gravel trying\u003cbr\u003eto catch the barrel till he falls sliding, sprawled and raked\u003cbr\u003eacross the stones. The babies scream.\u003cbr\u003eThe barrel hits the water, bobs into the cove.\u003cbr\u003eStill, for a moment he is flying out beyond heroics,\u003cbr\u003ewilled aloft a little once above the earth.\u003cbr\u003eBetter such flight than consequence.\u003cbr\u003eI want a man like this\u003cbr\u003ewho, restless, bookish, given to sudden outbursts\u003cbr\u003eor affection, takes running jumps,\u003cbr\u003eit would seem, all his life, against reason,\u003cbr\u003ea man who flies and falls, scraped head to toe,\u003cbr\u003ewhose daughters wash him in the lake\u003cbr\u003ewith Ivory soap,\u003cbr\u003edive down to pick the rock shards\u003cbr\u003efrom his legs, then dry him gently off\u003cbr\u003eand lay him in the Ozarks sun on a half- sunken dock\u003cbr\u003eand rub his ripped and bleeding skin with ointment.","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300882043109,"sku":"NP9780375711701","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375711701.jpg?v=1767742226","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-wind-blows-through-the-doors-of-my-heart-isbn-9780375711701","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}