h o m e........

p a s t   i s s u e s....

s u b m i s s i o n s....

l i n k s

MARTHA RONK

RAPTURE

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.

THE MISSED ECLIPSE

The missed eclipse wonders what was I doing that was so impatient

while slight lavender around the edge with its scientific explanation

was changed in the dream to a darker blue and though he was young

he crashed and the morning was entirely lost in a staged making 

that takes the entire morning to unmake 

and what I hadn’t wanted in a world supposedly there.

Against the tin siding a number of ceanothus, purplish

and we keep sitting on our lives like hands

and in a range of colors as the lilacs were then.

REREADING

Then one could see it where it had been all along. 

Then one puts a hand over a mouth.       

One never gets over that the plant repeats itself growing out of itself

and there it is again on the top of a hill.

I’ve gotten so I avoid passing by but this week there are so many others 

and one comes to understand pilgrimage as walking.

I was thinking of it only yesterday how we have lost the road,

the sounds on the pavement severing other sounds—

the turkeys wild in the un-cut fields, 

from the line of swallows scattering their wings.

This part of a life must be producing a decided next part.