Doug Ramspeck

May 28, 2024

“Bottomlands Dream” by Doug RamspeckPosted by

Doug Ramspeck

BOTTOMLANDS DREAM

The boy fell from the Monahegnee Bridge,
and his parents buried him, and the years
were a cottonmouth swimming in an oxbow 
lake, and the boy became an owl as he fell
and lived in the woods so that when he held 
himself motionless, he felt himself becoming
the gray bark of the tree. And sometimes
the boy swooped low across the bottomlands
behind the house of his parents, and sometimes
they watched him going by, and maybe he held
a mouse in his talons, or maybe the sun’s eye
blurred across the glass and transformed him
into a diffused smear of photons. One time
when he fell, he was caught in the updraft
of a prayer lifting itself toward the heavens,
and another time he landed in the lake then
became a catfish swimming along the muddy 
bottom, his body twisting and raising swirls
of murky visions. And his parents dreamed
sometimes of opening their arms at the bottom 
of the bridge and catching him. And the boy 
became a cottonmouth twisting his way
across the water’s surface, and the water
rippled out behind him and made of everything
a transitory motion, something there then gone.
And the boy whispered in the air as he went by,
I fall and fall but never strike the ground.
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

__________

Doug Ramspeck: “I wrote this poem in the fall, while being distracted by a bear with her two cubs as they climbed the oak trees outside my office window and fed on acorns and sometimes napped.” (web)

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December 3, 2022

“One True Poem” by Doug RamspeckPosted by

Doug Ramspeck

ONE TRUE POEM

The deer this time of year are gray. I see them
near the railroad tracks. What I like about them
is how they flee at the first sign they are observed.
But the one today is full-sized, on its side in the bar
ditch, with a white belly, its neck bent, smudges
of red in the snow like dropped handkerchiefs.
I have been thinking about how often my students
arrive at my office to show me poems they have written.
How often they tell the background story, how they
dressed up experience in the skin of a dead deer,
how they splayed themselves in a bar ditch for everyone
to see. Occasionally they weep, wiping their noses
with their fingers, their insides spilling raw at
the roadside, their necks lolling. Sometimes a single
salty drop falls to the handwritten page and stains it,
leaving a blue ink splotch, as though all sorrow
is a smudge. They want to be that poor deer
where the snow is coming down, dropping out
of the sky, making of the body a mound to be buried
in white, the smooth belly the same white as the snow,
as though a deer might enter the landscape, become
the landscape. To be that one true poem, the one
where you bleed a little on the snow. But tomorrow
I will remind my students that there is a weak sun
in this January sky, an old woman with b.o. they stood
behind once while taking the Sacrament, these Ohio
factories with their broken windows and the grass
in summer spilling through the cracks in the cement.
Please, I will say, there is more to write about than dying
grandmothers, a boyfriend who left you, a winning shot
in the state finals, a first sexual experience, an alcoholic
father who made your mother jump once from
a rowboat into Grand Lake St. Mary’s because she’d
forgotten the buns for the hotdogs. Just once let
your poems run wild into the night, like deer rushing
across the road, to feel the aloneness of the body, the way
the legs move and carry us. One last true poem, the one
where the deer is forever by the roadside, the cars
speeding past, how cold and hard the ground feels,
the snow covering us until the rains arrive come spring
and the body transforms gradually to mud. Together,
I will tell them, we will lift that deer from the bar ditch
and tumble it over the edge into the river, like in that
Stafford poem I assigned last week, though my
students all asked the same thing, over and over,
the same thing they always ask: is the story true?

—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

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Doug Ramspeck: “Given the content of ‘One True Poem,’ I feel strangely obliged to confess which parts of my poem are ‘true.’ I did not come across a dead deer before composing the work. My students do tear up sometimes and want everything they write to be confessional. I do plead with them to try something else. One student did write about her mother being forced from a rowboat because she forgot the hotdog buns. I did not assign Stafford to my students. Okay? Okay?” (web)

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May 23, 2020

“Gift Skull” by Doug RamspeckPosted by

Doug Ramspeck

GIFT SKULL

For years she kept it hanging like a mute wind chime
from a sweetgum limb near her tomato plants.
A bleached white possum skull she’d discovered
with her fingers while planting seeds. The dead mother us,
she thinks each time she sees it, as though we suckle
at the open eye socket, as though fifty teeth are the only
occultation we can know. Once she watched a marsh hawk
struck by a pickup while it was swooping low across the road.
The bird lived for a few moments in the drainage ditch:
twitching like an epileptic, gathering itself in the great shroud
of wings. Sometimes the wind sways the skull as though the ghost
in it has come alive. She might be watching from the window
or kneeling before her vines, and the gift of the moving skull
reminds her of rocking a child in a cradle, reminds her
of gripping your own knees and rolling forwards then backwards
and then weeping. After her infant son died, her breasts
were still heavy and swollen with the milk. She imagined
it as ghost milk. And after the hawk grew still, she stood
at the side of the road and thought of the possum
waddling once out of the woods and now swaying
as a skull on a string, the wind rolling through its open
eye sockets and along the great profusion of its teeth.

—from Rattle #30, Winter 2008

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Doug Ramspeck: “Two summers ago my daughter found a possum skull in our woods. After cleaning the dirt from it, she left it on the stone steps outside our house, where it remained for a few days before mysteriously disappearing. The poem in this issue is the third or fourth one in which that possum skull has insisted on making an appearance. I think it wants me to write an entire collection about it. I am resisting.”

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January 9, 2019

“The Long Dead” by Doug RamspeckPosted by

Doug Ramspeck

THE LONG DEAD

Mostly we smoked with our backs
to the fence, watching our classmates
filing out from the school grounds,
or we exchanged pills for a handful
of dollars, or we made rude remarks
to the girls we liked. One was named Marlene,
and nine years later she took her own life
in a bathroom of an apartment house
where she was living with her boyfriend
and their son, though back in high school
she would give us the finger or pretend
she might flash us. Her brother ended up
doing time for check kiting—a term
I didn’t know until he went away for it—
and decades later I saw him at a YMCA
with his clothes off, as fat as a walrus,
and he reminded me of a time we’d almost
stolen a car then had chickened out,
reminded me of a time we drove
to Wisconsin where the drinking age
was eighteen. Apparently he struck a car
in the parking lot before we headed back,
though I had no memory of the accident.
Mostly I nodded while he stood with a towel
draped over his shoulder, and we talked
about the long dead, including his sister,
and I imagined my back against the fence
as she was walking by, and I remembered how
she would turn as we called out, her mouth
undecided whether it were angry or amused,
and the clouds above her seemed a reliquary,
the earth spinning out on its wheel.

—from Rattle #61, Fall 2018

__________

Doug Ramspeck: “Sleep, in my childhood, was a wonderfully blank wall, but now there are so many fitful moments. And as inconvenient as this is, it is good for my poetry. Ideas often occur to me when I am on the borderline between sleep and waking, and ‘The Long Dead’ is an example. Insomnia may be a cranky and inconvenient muse, but I’ll take it.” (web)

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January 3, 2015

“Diaspora” by Doug RamspeckPosted by

Doug Ramspeck

DIASPORA

And in Turner’s Sun Rising
through Vapour:

Fishermen Cleaning
and Selling Fish,

the eye moves
without fail

from the clutter
of the human—

this compact labor—
to the sprawling

whorls and smudges
and smears

of primitive sky.
Once as a child

in Wisconsin, I handed
grape soda to a bear

on a chain, and the smell
of the animal body

was as familiar as the grass
I mowed each summer

up and down our yard’s hill,
watching, as I did,

an older girl two houses over
who sunbathed daily

on a towel, and died—
I later learned—

when a train struck
a car at a railroad crossing

in distant Colorado.
And although

we’d never spoken,
I grieved for weeks,

believing I’d known
her once the way a bear

lifts a soda bottle
in its paws, and sunlight

can’t quite tell itself
from morning clouds.

—from Rattle #44, Summer 2014

__________

Doug Ramspeck: “If we count reading and writing fiction and poetry, watching films, attending plays, listening to music lyrics, fantasizing, dreaming while asleep, and lying, we spend a surprisingly significant portion of our lives engaged with stories. I write poetry, I think, to join that human, storytelling chorus.”

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November 1, 2009

“Bottomlands Widow” by Doug RamspeckPosted by

Doug Ramspeck

BOTTOMLANDS WIDOW

Fire blight has infected her apple trees again.
The milky ooze drips as stigmata
from the infected blossoms. In her dream
she slices into the entrails of a musk turtle,
and what she finds—finds inside the apple-white flesh—
is something living, something pulpy and soggy
with blood, a girl child. After her husband died
she imagined for a time that she was pregnant.
In the woods she gathered bitter bolete,
rattlesnake plantains, goat’s rue. Her dream child
was as small as a fist. She heard once that birds
when they died became bats, which explained
their frenzied flight, their hinged wings.
Once her husband shot a doe and dragged it back
to the house. She was watching from the window
as he knelt down with the hunting knife.
She used to wonder as a child what kept the moon
from sliding on the clouds, what kept the stars impaled
so they wouldn’t slip. Her husband slipped the knife
into the swollen belly. She was watching from the window.
This evening her apple trees are bleeding, and rain drips
as stigmata from the sky. The hoot owl cries out
in her husband’s voice and shames her. She has no choice.
It shames her to say she is happy.

—from Rattle #27, Summer 2007

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