Doug Ramspeck

Mother Speaks of Winter Fires

And once I found her sitting at the back of the bedroom closet,
sitting there and smoking, and I might have been eight or nine, 

and she told me how she used to live on a mountain as a child,
how there was a river at the bottom where she sometimes sat. 

And she told me she would watch the cattails pirouetting
faintly in the wind, bending their thin backs. And she told me 

that once, as a teenager, she waded in over her head,
and she felt the dark river around her, and she imagined 

the night winds saying, Hush, hush . . . we are here, here.
And she said while sitting in the closet that she was picturing 

herself as once more my age and dangling her feet in the moving
current, her hair catching in the breezes. And she told me that from 

her bedroom window high on the mountain, she could see a thin
moon some nights jabbing its thorn into the other mountains across 

the valley, or the moon would come untethered and lift
like a balloon higher than all the peaks. And she told me 

that she returned to her childhood in her thoughts every time
she thought about dying, how she went there and built a winter fire 

by the river, build it in her thoughts. And she told me that sometimes,
in winter, she could see a mist collecting in the valley, collecting 

as vaporous as fallen clouds. And she told me that she dreamed
sometimes that she was walking down from that mountain into 

the last contagion of light amid the trees. And she imagined
that the first prayer was the rustling of dead grass in winter. 

And she imagined building a fire by the frozen river, imagined
the flames neither realizing nor minding she was there. And she 

told me that the moon would rise above her like a worry or a scold.
And she told me that she used to sit some nights inside 

her bedroom closet, that there was a narrow opening at its side
where she could just fit if she pulled up her knees and gripped 

them like she was gripping them now. And she said she sometimes
thought that if she slipped far enough back into childhood she might 

somehow find her mind wading across the dark sky, wading in
its original body, attempting to make a covenant with the stars.

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Doug Ramspeck is the author of ten poetry collections, two collections of short stories and a novella. His most recent book, Smoke Memories, received the Lena Shull Book Award. Individual poems have appeared in journals that include The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, The Sun and The Georgia Review.