Martha Clare Ronk, 5 poemas 5

Fotografía de Laura Marie

A MEMORY OF THE POND

If the slightly wet air in the skin is the hillside

is wherever I have to forgive what I have forgotten

is error unretrieved from clouds over ponds

is we’re going swimming she said.

What I can’t remember is what I can’t feel —

the same moist air almost going as the cloud from hill to hill

and what she looked like when we had hung about indifferent to time

   and place.

We had to forgive the backs of knees when it rained

and you can’t go in during a storm she said

you can’t go swimming after lunch and waiting for her to turn around

in the wet air through the length of a 40 years’ day.

(de Why/Why not, University of California Press, 2003)

(extraído de: JACKET MAGAZINE 13)

Fotografía de Laura Marie

GETTING A HOLD

The foreign objects are related to the accent

adopted on moving to the coast or the slang she picked up later

slung across the countertop or the glassy essence she was

drinking from a transparent object she got in a pawnshop

which defines what it’s like to hold a cup.

Or water running through one’s hands.

She meant to bring him some as well

and an invitation to an occasion she couldn’t name

like “getting hold of yourself” is wrapping a hand around

or a way of phrasing a song too fast to catch the words.

(extraído de: JACKET MAGAZINE 13)

Fotografía de Laura Marie

WHY DOES ONE DREAM OF THEM?

Those who show up aren’t necessarily the most friendly

or garrulous or even the most potent

but there they are dreaming away in one’s bed

and showing up year after year as if they expected some return.

I guess it’s why they bother given how far away they live,

trying to wrest something out of a clenched up hand.

What was the bit of polished glass or the sandy shell

and if one stares out the window to frame a thought

why the shutter was painted blue, why the rhythm of a wave

and why were monologues invented at all.

(extraído de: JACKET MAGAZINE 13)

Fotografía de Vivienne Mok

IN A LANDSCAPE OF HAVING TO REPEAT

In a landscape of having to repeat.

Noticing that she does, that he does and so on.

The underlying cause is as absent as rain.

Yet one remembers rain even in its absence and an attendant quiet.

If illusion descends or the very word you’ve been looking for.

He remembers looking at the photograph,

green and gray squares, undefined.

How perfectly ordinary someone says looking at the same thing or

I’d like to get to the bottom of that one.

When it is raining it is raining for all time and then it isn’t

and when she looked at him, as he remembers it, the landscape moved closer

than ever and she did and now he can hardly remember what it was like.

(de In a Landscape of Having to Repeat, Omnidawn Publishing, 2004)

Fotografía de Laura Marie

TO ANXIETY

Puttering, I put things 
off with a semi-
valiant intent to do 
what needs doing with-
out delay, practical, vett’d, 
sober. Or I pull 
a “big umbrella” rain
hat off the rack, 
march with the square-
jaw’d constructivists, pulling no
necessary punches, withholding no 
cry against the hazards
of a state security 
apparatus newly equip’d with
mambo Darth Vader trappings, 
insane riot-adducing gear 
for the routine crowd 
control, domestic, of post-
fútbol Saturday night barrio
toots, or the hotel
workers local’s measly picket 
line with its hand-
letter’d signs and nigh
unintelligibly bullhorn’d chorus of
demands. A regular pawn-
shop hero I am, 
all illegitimacy and hope 
pared down to despair.
I think of Kierkegaard
who says, “The doubter 
is like a lash’d 
top. He remains upright 
only whilst the throttling
continues, and is unable
to stand erect without 
it.” Or the enormous 
fib of Kafka: that
necessity for “a goal 
one makes one’s way 
towards by undergoing every 
kind of unhappiness.” Anxiety 
lies in the hock
shop retrieval, itching among 
heap’d up arrangements of 
hockey skates and Nancy
Drew books, the piety-
inflict’d owner yakking it
up about Agamemnon, presumably
the cat who’s extending 
one lazy orange paw 
out of the nether 
regions of a hutch. Who
snatches it back at 
the noise of my 
sneeze. Anxious, out of
angere, to choke. I
am choking, I am
choking off all gum-
shoe affability and making
for the border south
where rage isn’t just
another uneasy commodity when
the pinch is in.

Martha Clare Ronk 

(Cleveland, Ohio, EE.UU., 1940) 

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