Four Omens in Three Days
Doug Ramspeck
Our father is lying again on the kitchen floor
when my brother and I come down the stairs
in our pajamas. Dull light carves him in two.
Centaur man. Half light, half shadow.
Everything in this dawn grayness has
its membrane. The moon, which hasn’t yet
given up, has a corona, and a scar tissue
of snow has collected overnight in the yard.
First light has its secret names carved into
the smoke rising from the neighbor’s chimney,
the hour drawn taut as piano wire, our father’s
boots overturned beside him. Another day we found
him on the back porch, and once we spotted him
in the yard by his pickup, the first milky haze
rehearsing the body's disappearance. But here,
in this kitchen, we listen for the sounds
of his breaths. And here, in this kitchen,
the morning chill slips past the open
back door, and the broken vessels of the sky
wait with their hidden seams. The previous
afternoon, our father took us down to the river
and out across the ice. He said he liked to feel
it holding him, like to know it had hardened enough
to bear his weight. Yellow cattails swayed
in their abeyance along the bank. The ship of earth
seemed stalled. Everything in the winter woods
appeared alluvial. Our lips grew cold. And then,
as we watched, the itinerant, inevitable sun
punctured a cloud and brought down its garish glare.
And now, in this kitchen, we kneel and listen
for snores like tiny freight horns in the distance,
like little trumpets. Death, we are old enough to know,
smells like green film atop a brackish pond,
a bitter, fetid smell. When we lean closer, we inhale
stale beer. Then we hear our mother on the stairs,
see her coming into the kitchen in a robe,
and, without a moment’s hesitation, she steps
over our father and begins to prepare the batter,
and soon she is standing at the stove,
the spatula perched in her hand like a baton.
DOUG RAMSPECK is the author of ten poetry collections, two collections of short stories, and a novella. His most recent book, Smoke Memories (2025), received the Lena Shull Book Award.