Year after year the pokeweed and brambles.
The smell of dust beneath the canopy of aspens.
And our stone wall running off into the pale light.
Centerless mornings spinning out then losing track
of themselves. The drowsy retreat—like a fire
in the hills or the dead reeds at the water’s edge.
And soon the bones ache and the sky
is veiled in dim shapes at dusk. Snow falling
from a gray void. Trees, in summer, flaring up
like torches. Torpor settling in beyond the windows.
And so this old road curves to the cemetery
and peters out at the wrought-iron gate.
Bleak north winds roll across our indigent fields.
Here are the inexorable laws. Like what waits
beneath the thin wall of soil. Fragile
and easily crushed. The suppressed fierceness.
Like a ditch caving in and the exposed roots
clinging. Or the hunger of damp,
prickly summer. The day stiff as rigor mortis—
turning its slow steady wheel.

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Doug Ramspeck has had more than 150 poems accepted for publication by journals that include West Branch, Confrontation Magazine, Connecticut Review, Rosebud, Nimrod, Roanoke Review, RHINO, The Cream City Review, and Seneca Review. 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 sixteen-year-old daughter, Lee.