DOUG RAMSPECK

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Letters from the Field

The wild grass wrote to me  

about the way the moonlight 

 

was without heat against 

its body, the way passing 

 

cars trembled its stalks 

at the roadside. And the milkweed 

 

insisted that it grew in such profusion  

out of longing. As a child, I imagined  

 

that the nights were a closed gate,  

and the stars were the first religion. 

 

And the field wrote about  

the high spirits of thunderstorms 

 

and rain, about the monochrome white 

each winter of falling snow. 

 

And once I watched smoke rising 

like an occultation from a neighbor’s  

 

barn, and that smoke said, I float 

like an open wound across 

 

your fields. And often I stood 

at my bedroom window and listened 

 

to the river speak in tongues, 

listened to the silence of that falling snow,  

 

and the snow said, I fall to the ground 

to make this dream skin. 

 

Shadow and Horseweed

My father taught me to drive on country roads 
pulled taut and narrow as a rope, roads 
that overlooked farm fields and far horizons. 
And he told me I should not gaze close in front 
of the car but far into the distance, as though 
it were only the outlying destination that mattered, 
which he seemed to think was an object lesson 
for everything in life. He spoke often 
about the way the years undressed themselves 
until we stood naked amid the celestial meadow, 
an afterlife like some holy version of his Midwest. 
His one hatred, I knew too well, was horseweed 
and its profligate ways, and his faith in herbicides 
each fall and spring bordered on the fanatical. 
That the man was superstitious was illustrated 
by his insistent belief that if the shadow of a flying 
crow or hawk or buzzard passed through the body 
then it meant that some terrible woe was coming. 
He believed, too, that bats were birds that had died 
and had returned as dark spirits. And he would make 
a wide berth around discarded snakeskins—though 
live snakes elicited from him a terrible killing fury. 
In the year he spent knowing he was dying, 
he would sit on the back porch in a wool sweater 
and count the crows perching in the distant trees. 
There was a secret numerology involved, it seemed, 
for his calculations would sometimes leave him 
elated and other times he reminded us how he didn’t 
want to be burned but buried. And as his gaze grew 
nearer and nearer to the final hours, he told me 
once that angels had been known to masquerade 
as mourning doves cooing outside his bedroom 
window at first light, and that the mud of heaven 
was forever ripe with divine horseflies.  

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