Doug Ramspeck: “Landscape with Lake”
LANDSCAPE WITH LAKE
In another life, there was the sound
of the butternut hickories falling against
the roof as the sisters slept. And the nights
were like the uncut hair of the dead,
the years splitting open like a cracked egg
amid the plumage of stars. And still
there was the deer path in the woods
they took down to the lake most days,
with its abandoned boats of leaves floating
on the surface. And back at the farm,
there were the palpitations of soybean leaves
amid the fields, the whoosh of cars and trucks
up on the Interstate as it passed so near to the farm
that the girls saw the hemoglobin taillights.
And so the sisters spoke inside their shared room,
their voices like the wearing away of stone,
or they stood at their windows and watched the instep
of the moon as the ligature of stars tightened.
And sometimes, in winter, bruised snow
fell from the dark sky, and they woke
to the monochrome white of the world.
And there were deer prints in the powder
at the yard’s edge, prints leading down toward
the lake. And that lake, in January, was stasis.
And the surface had a thin skin, moon-pale
and dreaming. And the sisters expected,
somehow, that if they wiped the snow free
with the blades of their hands, their own faces
would be revealed beneath the ice. And at dusk
each day, they watched the last sunlight
ghosting the sky above the lake, the remnants
of day cleaving to the underbellies of the clouds,
night approaching with its empire of shadows.
Doug Ramspeck is the author of nine poetry collections, two collections of short stories, and a novella. His most recent book, Blur, received the Tenth Gate Prize. Individual poems have appeared in journals that include Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, and Georgia Review. Ramspeck is a three-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.