NEW WORLD
by Doug Sutton-Ramspeck

New World

Once, in California, I watched
two lovers wading in the ocean,

watched the black, consuming waves
wash over them—all mindless,

all dumb substance. We were living
separately that year, and I had flown

west to visit but had stopped in
the rental car before arriving

at the apartment. And from
the bluff’s height, I could see

the moon rising free now of its
socket, see the sleeping clouds

floating captive and disembodied.
I imagined the waves growing

epileptic in the wind, some glossolalia
of tongue flashing up. And it seemed

I could hear something coming,
slinking and crawling and emergent,

some hollowed husk pressing toward
shore with the waves. And the lovers,
meanwhile, were embracing
in the shallows while the water

ghosted past. And their bodies
were like the hives of stars that soon

would appear above the sea.
And I knew, in that moment,

how darkness can begin
at the spine then work its way

out into the body. And why,
from the distance of the sky,

there is only the curvature of land,
the sea bottoms that open into doors.

Long Marriage (Omens)

It is winter here. Clouds brood
on the horizon. And because

memory is geography, everything
is pared down: our children

living far away, our parents
long gone, the hours crawling

forward on their bellies. We exist,
we imagine, in the hardness

of the mud, in the triangular
prints of deer. And sometimes

we imagine that our thoughts
are as old as wind over snow,

as the fingers of desiccated grass.
We think: this is the life we have made.

Or we dream of prayers growing
thick above the Earth, of a blade

of light cutting a jagged line
across a ridge where shadows

bisect the lowlands. And sometimes
we pretend that the mountains

are a ship slowly pressing its prow
into the sea. But now, today, we study

how dust collects on our windowsills,
how the elongated railroad tracks

reach out and out across the fields,
how there are six, maybe seven crows

in the tree line past the fence, and how
we carry each hour as prophecy.

Sacred Omens

After she lost the child
in the eighth month,

the sun was dull canker
along the fence where

an amanuensis of wind
sifted through the autumn

leaves and where fog clung
some mornings with priestly

devotion. And everywhere
there were signs:

pine cones arranging
themselves in unexpected

clusters, the long bones
of railroad tracks stretching

into nothing, the lingering
moon a desiccated tongue

or an otherworldly wheel.
And once, in broad day,

she saw hinged wings
half-hidden beneath the loose

skin of a shagbark hickory,
the bat trying to burrow

out of sight, and later she heard
crows calling their occultations

from the woods, some abattoir
of sorrow, the sky gesturing

in its mother tongue of day
then night then day.

About the Author:

Doug Ramspeck is the author of six poetry collections and one collection of short stories. His most recent book, Black Flowers (2018), is published by LSU Press. Individual poems have appeared in journals that include The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Slate, and The Georgia Review. He teaches creative writing at The Ohio State University at Lima.