Winter Schools
- Winter Schools
And always we were reading,clouds of books strewnacross the couch and coffee table.Here was a blueprint for the bodyin repose, a map of the tall grassof thoughts through which we waded,this bundling come winter intosweat pants and wool socks as we satbefore the fire, consuming words.Sometimes we read on our bellies onthe floor, or we lay in bed with the syntaxof the page, and woke each morningto tangled legs and books that had fallen tothe floor or were tucked beneath our pillows.And we turned the pages like a slow pulseof waves, the fallow ploughlands of wordswaiting like the space between heartbeatsor breaths, a living abeyance while you steppedfrom a shower and dried the cuneiformtangles of your hair. The world outsidewas slowing in the cold, congealing as stilland as hard as ice, the ground wantingto find the permanence of stasis.Then you draped your legs across my lapand together—and separately—we read. [End Page 64]
Doug Ramspeck is the author of four poetry books. His most recent collection, Original Bodies, was selected for the Michael Waters Poetry Prize and is published by Southern Indiana Review Press. Two earlier books also received awards: Mechanical Fireflies won the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and Black Tupelo Country won the John Ciardi Prize. Individual poems have appeared in journals that include The Kenyon Review, Slate, The Southern Review, and The Georgia Review. He is an associate professor at The Ohio State University at Lima, where he teaches creative writing.
