Doug Ramspeck: “Crow Memory”
CROW MEMORY
This must be the world that came before.
The sun, with its dimming fire, is dreaming
its way into the trees, while the understudies
of the clouds drift on their slow freight
above the river. Or say the crows are obelisks
and the years are planted deep, the bulbs
of the decades reaching up and up.
My father would drink on a log
while gazing at the river, which must have
seemed to him a kind of busyness, a world
that was either emptying or replenishing itself.
And after he died, my brother and I rolled
that log into the current, imagining it
would float like a raft instead of sinking.
And the crows, as we stood on the bank,
splintered air, the sharpness of their cries
reaching back and back into some other
realm, into the long history of crows
emptying and replenishing
their dark cloaks amid the trees.
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, The Sun, and Georgia Review. Ramspeck is a three-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.