Bin Ramke, Earth on Earth

  

The Past

Is what we thought
it was. As in a sin.

Now that you are the oldest
in the room, what
future beckons? 

We know that cloud and clod connect electric
trickily the charge shadows itself
plus and minus 

until a spectacular
spark leaps I did once drop
into a ditch to save my head. 

No breeze to speak of today,
ripples raised in the birdbath by
the drinking of a wasp a witness 

the present tense of wasp
comfort in spite
of heat and the danger.

I’m intrigued by the philosophical meditations that Denver, Colorado poet Bin Ramke [see his 2012 "12 or 20 questions" interview here] offers and explores through his latest, Earth on Earth (Oakland CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2021). The author of more than a dozen full-length poetry titles, including Theory of Mind: New and Selected Poems (Omnidawn, 2009), Ramke works through his lyric meditations on life and being through a particular combination of density, sparseness and a light touch, laying bare a sense of both the strength and fragility of the earth, and human sensibility. “tree is a trick as a / trick of light,” he writes, as part of the poem “Fall,” “a tree falls every // century rots / roots and all / speedy spadesful // in the forest a sound / astounding silence [.]” He writes out poems of experience and attention, attuned to an ecological stretch of earth, science and philosophy, pinpointing his meditations across ageing, memory and melancholy, and a clear view of the light. “I did in late evening hear and see / the mullet leap and splash,” he writes, as part of “There Is No Consolation / Without Delight,” “bayou is a word from Choctaw / which gives me pleasure // Borges drew his self-portrait / after his blindness [.]” Ramke is very much the senior poet with little to prove and much to offer, writing his wealth of experience, and a slowness that resonates from the whole of the lyric. He writes on faith and on science, on family relationships and the temporal shifts of memory. He writes on the complications of death and of living, and those left behind, as well as the ongoingnessess of conversation, contemplation and the self, such as this poem around conversations with his late brother, “Flesh of the Word Game,” that begins:

I argued with my brother and my brother died.
I said Line cannot be seen it is a concept.
He said Can you concede there is a line
under that thing of graphite on the page?
I said No not so simple.