Doug Ramspeck's poetry collection, Black Tupelo Country, was selected for the 2007 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and is published by BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City). His chapbook, Where We Come From, is published by March Street Press. Several hundred poems have appeared in journals that include West Branch, Rattle, Confrontation Magazine, Connecticut Review, Nimrod, Hunger Mountain, and Hayden’s Ferry. He directs the Writing Center and teaches creative writing and composition at The Ohio State University at Lima. He lives in Lima with his wife, Beth, and their daughter, Lee.
Spring 2009
Table of Contents - Vol. V, No. 1
Poetry Interview Translations Fiction Book Reviews
Doug Ramspeck
Masque
To begin small: the vireo and his whisper song,
courting from the sweetgum tree.
Not the loud proclamation proclaiming the self.
Not the blustery masque of shrill notes piercing
the woods but:
leaning close and nearly speaking,
as though words
are wild fruit that sag and sag but cannot bring
themselves to fall.
To stand so near sometimes
it is a sky growing heavier and heavier
(wet air
would drown you if it knew how).
The vireo calling into the woods like a single
leaf falling from the highest sweetgum limb.
You look up and it is
drifting toward you. You don’t believe it will ever
reach the ground.
Here they come to dance the mud
from the shallows of the oxbow lake.
The sky is undone and shattered
into hundreds of them. With their bald heads
and wrinkled necks they must be old men.
Conjuring fish and frogs and water snakes,
summoning each as prophecy and occultation.
The evening his wife died he stood
on the back porch and heard them bellowing:
what arises from the lungs is hollowness
itself, forced air compressed as though to stone.
The white of the birds devours
the surface of the lake: what else can it do?
In the ancient covenant the hours are churned
as rising silt. He sees it sometimes
as a dream: the great birds lifting themselves
back into the sky, the black wingtips
stirring the low slung clouds.
He sat on the back porch.
Chorus frogs from the cypress swamp
carried in their voices
the fetid smells of muck
congealing on the surface
of the shallow waters. Sometimes a white ibis
flew up from the black willows
and made of its wings an occultation.
His grandmother knew to grind
up pickerelweeds, epidendrums,
and damselflies to make a potion.
He knew to listen in his dreams
to the alligator snapping turtle
rising from the brackish waters,
to the moon-white mouth
of the water moccasin opening
as the first syllable. When his wife
died a piercing scream from a bobcat
lifted from beyond the black tupelos,
and in the morning a dense mist
rose from the oxbow lake
as though to smother him.
As a child he would tremble if he saw
a barred owl sitting on a possumhaw limb
in bright daylight, and he would walk
around and around the tree, hoping
the bird would swivel and swivel
its neck until it snapped. Now he sat
on the back porch and gazed out
at the provenance of Spanish moss
and duckweed. Something was watching
from the sweetgum trees. He knew
it was the owl—it always was.
And always it was eyeing him.
© Doug Ramspeck
