Milk, and: The Transmigration of Souls

MILK / Deborah Digges This morning the light seems smaller, like waking under the paperthin 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 ...