Doug Ramspeck

Fire Garden

Look: the sky behind the fireweeds
has gone dull, the way a dim lamp
steeps a room in glow. And down 
by the stream the small child is playing
in the dirt, her bare feet soot-colored,
her matted hair bobbing as she gathers
stones. It appears to be a shrine
she is building, or perhaps it is a dam,
or perhaps it is simply that she likes
the way the stones change colors
in the shallows, turning darker,
clay-colored, the way memories turn
clay-colored.

	           The single bitternut hickory
near the stream remembers. It is blackened
on one side, the bark scarred and weathered
facing east. The memory of the fire~older
than the girl – seeps into the earth, buries
itself in the charred roots, in the waiting
loam. The smell of ash hides itself
in the leaf vein, in the oriole on the limb,
in the tree frog at gathering dusk.
				      Her father is
standing at the kitchen window, watching.
Everyone says the same thing:
she has her father’s seriousness.
They make it sound half like an affliction.
It is true there is a rawness in how
she holds herself tonight, in how
she kneels to place the rocks inside
the stream~a rawness like peeled fruit,
like skinned potatoes.
			Say the fire made an offering
of itself. It was long ago~the memory
has turned by now to clay. He watches
his daughter retrieving her rocks
from the shallows. She has washed them,
it seems, has prepared them. And as he watches,
she buries them not far from where the fire
came tumbling down the ridge.
She scrapes each hole then plants them
deep as seeds.

Why the Gods Abandon Us

If you have ever walked along a rocky coast
in winter, have watched pale December
sunlight dimming along steep granite cliffs,
have seen whitecaps disappearing into darkness
near Burnt Island, then you know. Surf wears
away at rocks. Salt spray rises like a prayer.
Once a boy from Indiana came home
from school to find his father’s prairie barn ablaze.
The smoke drifted low across the corn
and seemed to hang suspended near the cistern.
Another night he dreamed that a bronze monastery
bell was ringing somewhere in a Japanese
    courtyard.
He rose in sleep and walked in moonlight
across cobblestones until he saw a hundred
paper lanterns set out before a rocky cliff.
The ocean lay beneath him, as smooth yet round
as beveled mirrors. He knew somehow that he 
    was
dreaming; he knew that bells do not transform
to lanterns as they ring. But still he felt no
reverence for the sight. Instead he looked down
at his feet, which were bleeding and so formed
perfect rivulets of joy.

Crossing the World

There is a photograph of her beside a Baobab tree
near Shehu’s Palace. In the rainy season I walk
    with
her by Lake Chad, where the flies are dense as
Michigan mosquitoes. Words roll across your
    tongue
and leave their blessing: cassava, Yerwa, Bornu-
    Kanem,
Salah, mango, neem, hamartan. In August I am
    back
again and we ride down Bama Road. At the
    University
we stand before El-kanemi Hall, grow dizzy in the
heat, and speak in voices we no longer hear as
    ours.
    The
world is flat here. At any moment we will fall off
    the edge
and won’t come back. In January she sends me a
    drawing
of a gecko near the River Alo. I look out my
    window
and imagine the rolling power outages each
    morning.
We step down into the market on Ahmadu Bellu
    Road.
The lights blink out and I can’t see her. When
    they flicker
on again I am extinguished. The sun rises into
    nothingness.
I step out my door and stamp my feet. Tomorrow
    it will
snow. One flake will catch the wind and cross the
    world
to melt in Maiduguri.

Unremarkable Light

			                             That is:
after it has fallen through the black tupelos
and possumhaw, after it has been steeped in the
    pickerelweed
and bladderwort, after it sinks into our cypress
    swamp
then drowns.

Like what Miss Margaret once said about her
    Deaf Boys.
Or the low croak of the Great Egret in the evening,
which equates, in one sense,
to dimming shadows moving at a sluggish pace
beneath the water’s surface. Which is why Miss
    Margaret
imagines each mangled voice as unremarkable.
We are the broken vessels.
We are the cottonmouth asleep beside the
    epidendrum.
“They are mercy’s parasites,” she said once
as we stood beneath the Spanish moss.
“Here to teach us love’s pity.”
While night closed in around us as a covenant.

____

Doug Ramspeck directs the Writing Center and teaches creative writing and composition at The Ohio State University at Lima.