Sea Turtle
In his final winter Columbus took a cruise ship
to Antigua. The glass elevators fascinated him.
The indoor solarium was alive with Divine Voices.
In recent years he’d come to weep at how distant
all his memories had become: his long dead father
bent before the loom, his dear Bartolomeo laboring
before the maps. All of life was a great casting off.
Often he watched the tourists gorging themselves
in the Italian restaurant or drinking themselves
to a stupor at the Colony Club. Or he studied
the young women by the pool—naked, almost,
as those Carib natives he recalled as a forgotten dream—
or he leaned against his cane and envied the young men
scaling the climbing wall. In the past he’d steered ships
through hurricanes, was Viceroy and Governor,
consorted with royalty, discovered New Lands;
now he tugged the lever on the slot machine.
And then one evening he spied a sea turtle swimming
through the blood-red ancient water,
swimming to the world’s lip then disappearing.
Doug Ramspeck’s poetry collection, Black Tupelo Country, was
selected for the 2007 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and will be published by
BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City) in the fall of 2008. His
poems have appeared in journals that include West Branch, Rattle,
Confrontation Magazine, Connecticut Review, Nimrod, Hunger Mountain, and Seneca Review. He directs the Writing Center and teaches creative
writing and composition at The Ohio State University at Lima. Doug lives in Lima with his wife, Beth, and their daughter, Lee.