Four Poems Doug Ramspeck [Total Pages: 5] Ramspeck Page 1 Fire Garden Look: the sky behind the fireweeds has gone dull, the way a dim lamp steeps a room in glow. And down by the stream the small child is playing in the dirt, her bare feet soot-colored, her matted hair bobbing as she gathers stones. It appears to be a shrine she is building, or perhaps it is a dam, or perhaps it is simply that she likes the way the stones change colors in the shallows, turning darker, clay-colored, the way memories turn clay-colored.                The single bitternut hickory near the stream remembers. It is blackened on one side, the bark scarred and weathered facing east. The memory of the fire -- older than the girl -- seeps into the earth, buries itself in the charred roots, in the waiting loam. The smell of ash hides itself in the leaf vein, in the oriole on the limb, in the tree frog at gathering dusk.                                                             Her father is standing at the kitchen window, watching. Everyone says the same thing: she has her father's seriousness. They make it sound half like an affliction. It is true there is a rawness in how she holds herself tonight, in how she kneels to place the rocks inside the stream -- a rawness like peeled fruit, like skinned potatoes.