Deborah Digges: Darwin's Finches

1
My mother always called it a nest,

the multi-colored mass harvested

from her six daughters’ brushes,

and handed it to one of us

after she had shaped it, as we sat in front

of the fire drying our hair.

She said some birds steal anything, a strand

of spider’s web, or horse’s mane,

the residue of sheep’s wool in the grasses

near a fold 

where every summer of her girlhood

hundreds nested.

Since then I’ve seen it for myself, their genius—

how they transform the useless.

I’ve seen plastics stripped and whittled

into a brilliant straw,

and newspapers—the dates, the years—

supporting the underweavings.


2

As tonight in our bed by the window

you brush my hair to help me sleep, and clean

the brush as my mother did, offering

the nest to the updraft.

I’d like to think it will be lifted as far

as the river, and catch in some white sycamore,

or drift, too light to sink, into the shaded inlets,

the bank-moss, where small fish, frogs, and insects

lay their eggs.

Would this constitute an afterlife?

The story goes that sailors, moored for weeks

off islands they called paradise,

stood in the early sunlight

cutting their hair. And the rare

birds there, nameless, almost extinct,

came down around them

and cleaned the decks

and disappeared into the trees above the sea.

From Vesper Sparrows (1986). The “islands they called paradise” are the Galapagos. The sense of an afterlife, and the unspoken crossing to it, hangs heavily over the second section of the poem – in contrast to the pre-life of childhood which is the first section’s territory. In both sections, hair seems to symbolize something akin to the life of the moment: life that’s lost, stolen, ephemeral, of use not to humans but to birds that fly back to paradise.