Milk, and: The Transmigration of Souls

Deborah Digges

The Missouri Review, Volume 9, Number 2, 1986, pp. 9-10 (Article)

Published by University of Missouri

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mis.1986.0039

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/410973/summary

Access provided at 7 Jan 2020 11:19 GMT from University of Cambridge

MILK / Deborah Digges

This morning the light seems

smaller, like waking under the paper-
thin hood of a dream
or in an attic room.

In other Novembers
my father woke me near dawn.
He said he wanted company before
making
his hospital rounds.
He'd blow into my hands, give me
a warm egg to hold after
I dressed

beneath the blankets.

Then we stood by the stove while he
heated the milk, a new skin rising
to the surface.

He called it the milkman's shirt

and dipped his finger in.
What came away looked more like lace
from a wedding dress
or a woman's bed-jacket,
the one she'd slip on
just before the doctor came, the first
to see her, mornings.

The Missouri review · 9

 THE TRANSMIGRATION OF
SOULS / Deborah Digges
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, Concepción, 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 legs 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 lock 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.

10 · The Missouri Review