North Dock
By Doug Ramspeck

It is like the laying on of hands. The water rides
up to your knees in the shallow lake.
The shagbark bows its head and makes a sound
like a hissing snake. Ruin is everywhere.
..........................................................Someone drowned.
It is like that mad old deaf woman fishing all day
from North Dock. Watching her water lilies
twitching like epileptics in the wind.
Watching her catfish twitching like epileptics
on the dock.
..........................................................At night
in the cabin her wood stove spews smoke
like a misshapen voice, and the sky is oiled black
beyond her window. She mixes potions
of rosinweed and chicory, slits minnow underbellies
to the entrails. This is a ghostly blossoming. Rotting loam
seeping through the screen mesh.
.............. .............. .............. ...... ......Then by day
she’s out again on North Dock: watching the mud clouds
catfish raise. The long bodies sinuous. The long
whiskers whispering. Imagine what she hears when
they come undulating toward her. Fins bloodying
your fingers. Lopped-off heads oozing.
Skillets heated till they glow.
.............. .............. ............................Someone drowned.
This is the glassy darkness of Lake Campion at dusk.
The sound of wind twitching through shagbark leaves,
of catfish heads strung from shagbark limbs.
Sometimes she peers into the flowering wapato,
and sometimes she plucks catfish eyes and carries them
as talismans. And in the stupored light, on the shallow lake,
she hears singing.
.

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