Rapture

Martha Ronk

Into this file must go the viewing of films so that characters leave one room
and enter another in which events happen to them in the dark.
History comes to a head in the time of the disaster that structures it.
It depends on knowing that raptor and rapture share the same root.
The hawk over the cleft in the hill heading towards its prey heading towards
where the wind is taking it. Bill Evans in a nightclub I never went to.
Documentaries must be filmed in grainy black and white
and it’s best to include voice-overs to explain the inscrutable parts.
Even a nightclub is an historical event given the costumes women wore
and Lauren Bacall gambling too much and rhapsodic about him or acting the part.
I pretend to look at the hawk and it seems a good idea given the circumstances
so I make myself do it and after a time it is all I want to do all afternoon.

Greek phrenitikós, frantic

Silence isn’t stillness, agitation has me in its grip

remember reading       Greeks were like us

restless            underneath and again underneath

water wearing away               crevices          the itch

of canyons             skin I didn’t outgrow as

the doctor promised     burns hot and stinging

allergic to what I bring to it            allergic to

what I’m thinking     how much older 

the underpass is     filled to overflowing

blue-tented absence                corners with the leftover

plastic and cardboard     happens so fast        it isn’t

even my heart that’s

Martha Ronk

2018

Take #2

Does staring into the black and white contours of a photo
enable a rapprochement with the unreality of one’s own life,
a way to see peculiarity as a back staircase in an old house in a city
so memorably far, dark but navigable, the stairs lacking undulation,
items strewn across a landscape, fixed and determined,
the borders of history and frame set and watching her feet going up and down,
counting the risers that are always 16 despite the deformations of dreams,

Martha Ronk

2016

Location LA

Never arriving in a city missing in locational drift
plates shifting under building facades and whipped décor,
seas rising and falling at the edge of amusements
and surf. The migrations migrating elsewhere,
monarchs lost on their way south, children coming north
in droves on their way to anywhere else.
The city of lost souls blowing in the Santa Ana winds
and people who are not us no matter who we are.
Where is she now, he asks, what ever happened to the girl
named for a saint, the one with the ankle tattoo

Martha Ronk

2015

Poems

Rapture

More by this poet

Greek phrenitikós, frantic

Take #2

Location LA

Poems

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Rapture

More by this poet

Greek phrenitikós, frantic

Take #2

Location LA

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