Poems by Doug Ramspeck

Night Trains

She hears them in the distance like bodies laid out

across some opium summer, like dark blisters

on the skin of a breath. And what they are saying

is modulated yet slathered with sweat, like dozing

as a child beneath a cyst of sun, drained by

the trocar of July. Her sisters—sunbathing

beside her—were flesh and freight and dust devils

levitating in their father's field. One winter the snow

covered their steps as they walked in the dark to the railroad

tracks, where nothing existed except the laddered

sky and the falling gray and the viscous vibrations

of air. And the three of them, together, shouted into it.

 

Field Dressing

I keep trying to speak like a flaring shadow.

The crows are a blackout, are paper parasols.
           I am standing by the fence when my father 

emerges from the woods. The clouds

secrete their white juices.
           Words have their stations, after all.

They writhe into one shape

and then another.
           The deer is on my father's back.

Four legs forward.

Neck lolling. And down—as my father kneels—
           the creature falls.

There is blood on the snow.

This is what is effaced
           is still there.

The knife in the belly, sternum to crotch.

The tongue shuddering
           in birdlime.