Ghost Clouds
She imagined it as the erosion of each night,so many gray mornings after. It was always after,some intensification of personal history,the self forever the reconstituted trees liftingtheir dead winter fingers toward the sky. And so the yearsbecame a starving horse she saw once in a dream,the exposed hulls of its ribs visible while a cold flutteringof snow came ashing down, ghost clouds snortedfrom the nostrils. She believed, then, that her husbandwas like a light shawl she wrapped around her shoulderssome evenings in the cold, was like the pink behind her closedeyelids in the heavy summer sun. At night she listenedto his breaths as though they were locked in some preciserotation of the seconds, each inhalation a mystic or madeof unbaked clay. And she dreamed that their son emergedagain from the hidden crease, but this time whenshe bent to kiss him, the carapace of his foreheadbruised her lips. And so the years spread out like brokenvessels, like the hemoglobin taillights she saw sometimeson the highway not far from the house. The hours, soon,became like diving into deep waters, the pressurelike a hand against the skin, as though it were possibleto cross out every geography behind her, to scribblealong the edges of the body and to make it disappear. [End Page 218]
Doug Ramspeck is the author of seven poetry collections and one collection of short stories. One recent book, Black Flowers, is published by LSU Press. Other books include Distant Fires, winner of the Grayson Books Poetry Prize, The Owl That Carries Us Away, winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, and Original Bodies, selected for the Michael Waters Poetry Prize and published by Southern Indiana Review Press. Individual poems and stories have appeared in journals that include The Kenyon Review, Slate, The Georgia Review, and The Southern Review. Ramspeck is a three-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. His author website can be found at dougramspeck.com.
