Hobble Creek Review
| Doug Ramspeck |
Invisible
That doesn’t mean you can’t see it.
Rootless night slowly escaping beyond
the rosinweeds. Every shooting star pink
or white at dawn with swept-back petals.
To walk there in the morning was to walk into
the votive lights. There were mysteries in tickseed,
and from the stream’s edge the house
rose as a pale ideogram beyond the goldenrod.
There are things you think you see.
Masks disguising themselves as other masks,
the cloud-hammered sky riding low
above the prairie, the profusion of bluebells
wind-swept and swaying all in one direction
beyond the railroad tracks. What interested me
was the way a train horn throbbed as an aura
and so became a strange aphasia of light,
as though the vibration were the celestial landscape
on which the prairie knew to sprout its grass.
Even the marsh hawk could hide itself in a clear sky.
I squinted each day into the mesmerizing blue—
then night returned and brought a cold so palpable
yet steeped in the invisible that I could breathe it.
Diamondback Prophecy
A diamondback sank its fangs
into his wrist in the pine and oak woodlands.
He was reaching for firewood at dusk,
watching a pipe-vine swallowtail
fluttering above the yarrows as the snake struck.
He knew he should kill it, should cut it into pieces
with his knife, should press the pieces
against the wound to draw out the poison.
Instead he let the snake twist away
into the undergrowth, let it disappear
into the mountain laurels. He walked
back to his cabin, dressed in his Sunday suit,
lay down in bed, and waited. Surely the fever
would lift him in its heat and carry him
forever into the fire. It didn’t happen.
In the morning he rose from bed, walked out
on the back porch, and stared at his hand
in the sunlight. It was barely swollen.
The fang marks gazed at him like two eyes.
He was changed after that. He knew the poison
was within him, his future foretold.
The diamondback was biding its time.
It was waiting for the perfect moment
to cast him without hope into the fire.
Evidence
Notice the dialectic of evening: the flaw of dusk
bleeding into the flaw of land.
In his final years my father became like the kestrel
too blind to recognize the dragonfly or grasshopper,
hovering pointlessly above the summer field.
Imagine a mind wandering untethered into the past—
a grandmother’s rooming house in Michigan,
the drowning death of a younger brother—
then drifting off as rote mindlessness before the television.
It was Plato who argued that everything known
or knowable is already present in our memories:
The wings move and somehow stir the air.
It is Plato who keeps asking my father the names
of his children and his wife,
who keeps asking the kestrel what remains
as a prairie field disappears below you.
That doesn’t mean you can’t see it.
Rootless night slowly escaping beyond
the rosinweeds. Every shooting star pink
or white at dawn with swept-back petals.
To walk there in the morning was to walk into
the votive lights. There were mysteries in tickseed,
and from the stream’s edge the house
rose as a pale ideogram beyond the goldenrod.
There are things you think you see.
Masks disguising themselves as other masks,
the cloud-hammered sky riding low
above the prairie, the profusion of bluebells
wind-swept and swaying all in one direction
beyond the railroad tracks. What interested me
was the way a train horn throbbed as an aura
and so became a strange aphasia of light,
as though the vibration were the celestial landscape
on which the prairie knew to sprout its grass.
Even the marsh hawk could hide itself in a clear sky.
I squinted each day into the mesmerizing blue—
then night returned and brought a cold so palpable
yet steeped in the invisible that I could breathe it.
Diamondback Prophecy
A diamondback sank its fangs
into his wrist in the pine and oak woodlands.
He was reaching for firewood at dusk,
watching a pipe-vine swallowtail
fluttering above the yarrows as the snake struck.
He knew he should kill it, should cut it into pieces
with his knife, should press the pieces
against the wound to draw out the poison.
Instead he let the snake twist away
into the undergrowth, let it disappear
into the mountain laurels. He walked
back to his cabin, dressed in his Sunday suit,
lay down in bed, and waited. Surely the fever
would lift him in its heat and carry him
forever into the fire. It didn’t happen.
In the morning he rose from bed, walked out
on the back porch, and stared at his hand
in the sunlight. It was barely swollen.
The fang marks gazed at him like two eyes.
He was changed after that. He knew the poison
was within him, his future foretold.
The diamondback was biding its time.
It was waiting for the perfect moment
to cast him without hope into the fire.
Evidence
Notice the dialectic of evening: the flaw of dusk
bleeding into the flaw of land.
In his final years my father became like the kestrel
too blind to recognize the dragonfly or grasshopper,
hovering pointlessly above the summer field.
Imagine a mind wandering untethered into the past—
a grandmother’s rooming house in Michigan,
the drowning death of a younger brother—
then drifting off as rote mindlessness before the television.
It was Plato who argued that everything known
or knowable is already present in our memories:
The wings move and somehow stir the air.
It is Plato who keeps asking my father the names
of his children and his wife,
who keeps asking the kestrel what remains
as a prairie field disappears below you.
Doug Ramspeck directs the Writing Center and teaches creative
writing and composition at Ohio State University at Lima. He lives in Lima
with his wife, Beth, and their daughter, Lee. His recent publications
include his full length poetry collection, Black Tupelo Country, (BkMk
Press, 2008).
writing and composition at Ohio State University at Lima. He lives in Lima
with his wife, Beth, and their daughter, Lee. His recent publications
include his full length poetry collection, Black Tupelo Country, (BkMk
Press, 2008).
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