by Doug Ramspeck
Here where the years congeal inside the body,
I sleep, I wake, am ferried into the new world.
Nothing changes after always, the limbs of the plum
trees outside this window drooping so low they almost Continue reading
Tag Archives: Doug Ramspeck
The Myth of Fingerprints
Filed under Poetry
Baobab
by Doug Ramspeck
He can’t be certain how much he actually remembers and how much he has been told by his mother. The stories and his memories are the vine and the tree so intertwined you can’t know to distinguish one from the next. He does know he was very young in that time before they left for the United States. His father showed him how to hide beneath the Baobab tree behind their house. It was a great tree, as old as the moon—or so his father teased—with spirits waiting in the fruit from which they sometimes made a porridge. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Light and Windows
by Doug Ramspeck
If long-legged morning fell through glass,
I woke to the persisting marriage. You can say
the hemmed-in stars were nightingales.
You can say the grass that summer grew a small psalm through
a fissure in the sidewalk. Once you opened your eyes
beside the same person for forty years.
Continue reading
Hourglass
by Doug Ramspeck
When Father stepped into the dark hall
then disappeared,
I think the washed corpse of moon was buried in the sky.
Someone dreamed the horses
by the fence. Someone walked into the deep woods where
coins of rain slipped and stained the body. We watched
for familiar signs in the erratic wings of moths, in the
native tongues of jays beside the river. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
Hawaii Pacific Review 