martharonk — Three Fold

Martha Ronk

graphemes

at the tops of trees against the sky, letter forms tilted as lances
askew and melting, black as ink cross the highest line of trees
outlined against the lighter sky, hieroglyphs morphing
as the tips lengthen or shorten and from this distance
it is as always impossible to make out the vivid yet unreadable set there
and hence the link between an abecedarium and any meaning
remains a dialect spoken by darkened photographs in cardboard boxes—
momentum and deformation a few minutes ago I’ve forgotten the blur
of each E elongating itself and yet, the sudden awakening from such placement
although inexplicable is deep and even delirious, a page of a better book
than I shall ever write, leaf after leaf presenting itself to me

The page of life that was spread out before me seemed dull and commonplace only because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A better book than I shall ever write was there; leaf after leaf presenting itself to me, just as it was written out by the reality of the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only because my brain wanted the insight, and my hand the cunning, to transcribe it. At some future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find the letters turn to gold upon the page. —Nathaniel Hawthorne

what I want

that the tree having lost a limb growing old on this property might last
might last a few more summers while I am watching it each day reconstructing
other trees and those twisted Van Gogh yellows and limes awash in leaves
in the heat of the day June 1889 olive trees near the asylum at Saint-Rémy,
but out here it’s black and white as the sky pales and each limb
becomes thoroughly itself, dark, rough, turning over some as the light dictates
and of a sudden there is the contrast and the negative space and the back and forth
creates a state of mind not of the asylum but increasingly unhinged as if
one could take leave easily as light skinnies down the smooth black trunk
and remember every tree every redwood every shore pine
we ever brought home in small plastic pots

The olive trees with the white cloud and the mountains behind, as well as the rise of the moon and the night effect, are exaggerations from the point of view of the general arrangement; the outlines are accentuated as in some old woodcuts.
— Vincent Van Gogh

hawthorns

to cross-over, to walk into—wrong word, but it’s a without body-
embodied movement I’m after, a mythos such as into the other,
the frame—I’d be with her yellow dress as into a leaf frond,
into a saturated, one-with-it illusion, anything out of where-I-am
what I’ve been. I lost it I said to her, was just bits of colored cloth,
a ragged collage next to her yellow dress as into a sea
of warm saltwater and just in time as Marcel said it of hawthorns
pale mauve outside the frames of windows, the pale marl
of the frame, brushwork intent—who can say one chooses as it grabs
your entire, call it attention, this merging beyond motive
a life’s invaded, read and unread, seen and unseen, bits clinging
and you haven’t even gotten on a train to go anywhere
but you keep arguing with her without an argument and yet

The hedge allowed us a glimpse, inside the park, of an alley bordered with jasmine, pansies, and verbenas, among which the stocks held open their fresh plump purses, of a pink as fragrant and as faded as old Spanish leather ... Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when something appears that requires not only our eyes to take it in, but involves a deeper kind of perception and takes possession of the whole of our being.
— Marcel Proust

meditation on

why meditation on black and white photographs, Sugimoto refers to
as voyages of seeing, as visiting his ancestral home, the horizon line
cuts across, sometimes sharp, sometimes not, or clouds come into it
and why this haze holds me and keeps me—the difference between sea and sky
somehow we need it there vibrating and motionless, an interval perhaps
of no self, that is to say, my staring & inability to move or shift positions
arbitrary and fixed, an event of fossilized imposition
a home existing nowhere, seafaring strangers setting off

Martha Ronk has published 13 books of poetry, most recently A Place One Is (Omnidawn 2022) and A Myth of Ariadne, based on De Chirico’s paintings of Ariadne (Parlor Press 2022). Her work is included in North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language, eds. Lisa Sewell and Kazim Ali (Wesleyan University Press, 2020). She lives in Los Angeles and spends several months on Humboldt Bay in Northern California.