text: This is how it’s done.
  The villagers surround the house,
  beat pots and pans, beat shovels to drain spouts,
  crowbars to shutters, rakes
  raining rake tines on corrugated washtubs, or wire
  whips, or pitchforks, or horseshoes.
  At first they keep their distance
  as if to wake you like blackbirds, though the birds
  have long since fled, flown deep into the field.
  And for a while you lie still, you stand it,
  even smile up at your crimes
  accompanying, each one, the sunrise stuttering across the ceiling
  like the sounds within the sounds,
  like lightning inside thrum-tink, woman-in-wood-shoes-fall-
  down-wooden-stairs, like wrong-wrong inside rung-rung,
  brick-smacking-brick housing ice-breaking-ice-
  breaking-glass . . .
  I mention this since this is what my dreams
  are lately, rough music,
  as if all the boys to women I have been, the muses, ghost-
  girls and the shadows of the ancestors
  circled my bed in their cheap accoutrements
  and banged my silver spoons on iron skillets, moor
  rock on moor rock, thrust yardsticks into the fans.
  Though I wake and dress and try
  to go about my day,
  room to room to room they follow me.
  By evening, believe me, I’d give back everything,
  throw open my closets, pull out my drawers spilling my hoard
  of dance cards, full for the afterlife,
  but my ears are bleeding.
  I’m trapped in the bell tower during wind,
  or I’m the wind itself against the furious, unmetered,
  anarchical applause of leaves late autumns
  in the topmost branches.
  Now the orchestra at once throws down its instruments.
  The doors in the house of God tear off their hinges—
  I’m the child's fist drumming its mother’s back,
  rock that hits the skull that silences the martyr,
  or I’m the martyr’s tongue cut out, fire inside fire,
  clapper back to ore, ore into the mountain.
  I’m gone, glad, empty, good
  riddance, some shoulder to the sea, the likeness
  of a wing, or the horizon, merely, that weird mirage, stone-
  skipping moon, the night filled up with crows.
  I clap my hands.
  They scatter, scatter, fistful after
  fistful of sand on water, desert for desert, far from here.
  Copyright Credit: “Rough Music” from ROUGH MUSIC by Deborah Digges, copyright © 1995 by Deborah Digges. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
  Source: Rough Music: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)