Skinny Dipping with Kierkegaard

By Doug Ramspeck

Mosquito abatement was our summer job,
which is not as glamorous as it sounds.
It was the 70s, and K. explained how mosquitoes
were a metaphor for God. He was living
with a girl named Regine, and in the evenings
we got high and listened to the Doors.
Sometimes K. read passages from the Bible,
once about Abraham almost slaughtering
his own son. It was weird shit.
Poor Isaac asking like a numbskull
where the goat was. By day K. talked
interchangeably about faith and buying condoms,
as though they were the self-same thing.
Once he asked while driving the mosquito truck
whether I thought a belief in God demanded
a suspension of the ethical. He asked if I agreed
that the central paradoxes of Christianity
were an assault on reason—and wasn’t that
a good thing? My mother accused him of being
a long-haired atheist, but K. pointed out
that Jesus was a long-haired atheist,
at least in the sense that he didn’t embrace
the hegemonic ideologies of his time.
We gassed a lot of mosquitoes, I suppose.
Then one night we went skinny dipping

with Regine in the river. Her hair came down
almost to her ass. K. blew smoke to try
to get the mosquitoes high. Then he swatted
one on his arm and announced that its blood
was the blood of Christ. We laughed, of course.
This is not to say we didn’t believe him.
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Parable of Living Alone

By Doug Ramspeck

You might say that the frail light
is the voice of the other world.
Or you might say it’s the collapsed lung
or the cinders swept away
from beneath the fire grating.

But last night you compared the peaceable kingdom
to the fluted waist of the mud dauber
and the fragrant breath of the wild columbine.
I was amazed to see the candles wavering.
We argued about the differences between
Bruegel’s The Death of a Virgin
and Caravaggio’s, and near dawn we heard the rain
but could not see it falling past the window.

I have a friend who tells me sometimes
of a series of poems she is writing about the body.
Each poem is meant to mimic the sound the mourning doves
make on her back patio at first light.
The body, she claims, is flecked with spit
and brings us tidings.
The body, she claims, is either a sexual pathology
or an aviatrix, though often pilotless,
if that makes sense.

I have come to think that every form of writing
implies its separation from the world.
A manyness redacted and reduced down to a parable.
It is the red fox standing in the field at dusk,
the sky swollen and bruised to match its self-same color,
but no one would imagine they were joined.
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Doug Ramspeck’s poetry collection, Black Tupelo Country, was awarded the 2007 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and will be published in the fall of 2008 by BkMk Press. His poems have appeared in West Branch, Connecticut Review, Seneca Review, Confrontation Magazine, Rattle, Nimrod, and numerous other literary journals. He directs the Writing Center and teaches creative writing and composition at The Ohio State University at Lima. He lives in Lima with his wife, Beth, and their daughter, Lee.