Doug Ramspeck

Aristotle

I walk here because the air is dry

as tinder and the sounds of the scrub jay

and the fox sparrow are not the same

as the sounds of the cell phones

and the microwaves at my apartment.

In the city everything arrives

as though from the great machine

of human thought, but out here

I pause before the chaparral

and squint my eyes for a mule deer,

a brush rabbit, a coyote. There is an essence

to birchleaf cercocarpus, to manzanitas,

to our lord’s candles I cannot find

in the drive-up window at the Taco Bell.

And sometimes I imagine that the sound

of the iPod in my ears is the sound of a priori

principles, or then it seems that I have grown

small against the weight of years.

Once I was a student of Plato, tutor

to young Alexander the Great,

and taught anatomy, geography, meteorology,

physics, astronomy, embryology, ethics,

aesthetics, rhetoric, politics, theology.

Now I collect my monthly pension,

watch satellite television, and take my weekly

walk into these hills. Up here there are no

material causes or formal causes or efficient causes

or final causes; there is the dusky-footed woodrat

with its stick towers that remind one inevitably

of fallen empires. There is nothing left.

Each few years a great and cleansing

fire lifts its dark smoke so I see it

from my bedroom window, drifting

its epistemological gray into the sky.

Reading Sartre to a Pear Tree

When I was pruning a dead limb

from a dying pear tree, I thought

for some reason of a line from Sartre:

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

Though my favorite line has always been:

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

And the impatient sound the rain

was making on the stone steps—

the great embellishment as monologue

or messenger or megaphone—made me think

next of a quote from Rilke spilling and chastising

from the page: I won’t endure these half-filled

human masks. So do we mourn the pear

that never was by imagining Eve’s teeth marks

pressing into the white fruit? Or do we quote

a few last lines in the rain to a severed limb

and then toss it in the buttonbushes?

 

Bored

And what about the anthem

of gunfire in the streets

while you are sleeping?

 

The nights lit by the blue

refinery flames?

 

You tell me how you dream

that the rain falls from the sky

like needles pressing deep

into a vein.

 

While the black tar of the sky

pushes down on the city

where the streets are empty

and the garbage bins

are filled with apocalyptic stench.

 

And so the years pass as boredom.

Sitting on a curb.

Setting fire to abandoned cars

by the river.

 

The smoke lifting its name

into the sky. The smoke

obliterating the moon.

 

The bodies leaving and entering

the apartments. Exchanging

 

their legs or their arms. Shedding

the confetti of their skin.

 

These hours of the flesh.

The tedium of cigarette smoke

and the smell of soot

wafting through the screen mesh.

 

At then my brother at the wake,

yawning. Even now he’s bored.

The tie clawing at his throat.

His hands pale

as a dead white star.

 

And afterwards drinking coffee

at our aunt’s place. Getting high.

Walking out back to listen

 

to the sound of the wind

beating the tired drum

of broken fence.

 

Painted Turtle

There are warnings: the starling

breaking its neck on the back window.

The ringneck snake whipping

past the gazebo. I understand now

why the eaves leak each time

the rainstorms hunker overhead.

But still these days arrange themselves

as the slowness of the hours.

As the painted turtle swimming

with just its dark head visible in the pond,

the veil of its body mostly hidden.

And then this morning you arrive

on the front porch with your bags,

and you look at me the way

the stones gather themselves around

the garden pond, circling it and making

of it an enclosed space. And then

the starlings are everywhere in the yard.

Hundreds of them. And the sun burns

and so eats its way into the sky.