Citizen Dirt & Don’t ask what this says about me
by Doug Ramspeck
[ poetry - august 07 ]
Citizen Dirt
So I married her, I said, down on all fours,
this wedge of flagstone stubborn in the earth.
There were atoms everywhere, or molecules,
yet every time I batted one aside another
found me. Soon I spotted a leopard frog hiding
in the tall grass, and it eyed me
like a semi-colon or a best man, and then one more
flagstone pizza wedge cracked my shovel
while my tie was strangling at my throat.
I could not speak my vows. It is the duty
of every citizen to bury the first corpse
we can imagine - to keep it from decaying
in the buttonbushes. And so this hole I make provides
whatever solace I imagine, while soot-faced
evening watches tired and irresolute
above the shagbark hickories. It’s not just
the fertile soil of getting married
but the ontology of excavation, the great gap
clawed up from the earth so what we know
of our existence is its digging.
Don’t ask what this says about me
I wake up and everyone is gone.
Or maybe I wake up and everyone is going.
I watch them walking out of my life:
some of them are carrying tennis racquets
or coffee cups or dented mailboxes,
and some of them are carrying mirrors
or business cards or cauliflower florets,
and one is carrying a dead cat or a sleeping ferret.
And of course the morning sky is as pale
as a graveyard bone, and the day is sticky hot,
and I can’t seem to get myself to stand,
so of course I imagine the perfect death-bed scene:
every lost lover lining up in the apartment house
parking lot, each dressed in a long flowing cape
as black as loam, and slowly they start filing in
and each one makes a quick, sombre pass
before the bed and utters a strange, soft-throated
sound like a dove cooing. It is the same sound
Scheherazade must have made when she began
to tell her story, the same sound as a bottle
of sleeping pills when you shake it, the same sound
you hear inside your head when the phone rings
and someone turns your way and says, For you.
