Coyote
by Doug Ramspeck
We were farm boys so embarrassed by the accent
when our father would read to us Goethe in the evenings,
usually passages from Die Leiden des jungen Werther,
his voice returning to the slow and muddy childhood river
full of dark stones blocking the old tired current.
So when the fire arrived from the ridge in the drought
and claimed our barn where the hay was stacked, when none
of our livestock made it out alive, I thought of Werther
climbing the pear tree and shaking down the fruit
for Charlotte to catch, thought of how he kissed her hand
with tears and how bored my brother and I always felt
while our father's great Adam's apple was throbbing
with words that seemed to touch him more profoundly
than his wife and sons. For days afterwards the air smelled
everywhere of smoke, and my brother and I found
in the abandoned cistern at the far edge of our land
floating leaves, all charred, some shriveled and black,
others a dark brown mud. Then much later
when I lived in California and fire had a season
all its own, I would see the sky glow orange at night
or watch a burning ash drifting out of the canyon.
Once a coyote, blackened from the flames,
staggered into the back yard, and I remembered
my father's voice when he spoke with pride
about how two thousand young men were said
to have committed suicide after reading
Goethe's melancholy work. And I remembered
the heat lightning branding the sky beyond
the cemetery at my father's funeral. So tonight
I am recalling the hardscrabble Midwestern prairie
my father called his adopted home, and I am thinking
about walking with my brother in the first winter
following the fire and seeing a cloud, deep gray
and slow moving, floating over the barn whose walls
had been knocked down after the flames had destroyed
everything inside, and there was something
in the cloud's visage that made me think of poor Werther
and his sorrows. Until that moment I had been focusing
only on the bitter pleasure of the cold, but then I looked
back and saw the boot prints my brother and I had left
in the snow between us and our father's house,
and the sight to me was almost beautifully unbearable.
My poetry collection, Black Tupelo Country, was selected for the 2007 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and is published by BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City). My chapbook, Where We Come From, is published by March Street Press. Several hundred of my poems have been accepted by journals that include Prairie Schooner, Epoch, West Branch, Third Coast, Northwest Review, and Hayden's Ferry. I was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2009. I direct the Writing Center and teach creative writing at The Ohio State University at Lima.