Martha Ronk
Summer 2024 | Poetry
Three Poems
signs
On the sand seaweed unwritten and sprawled
a backward C, a clumped E. multiple S’s.
Presentiments come in external shapes and internal
bursts of alkaline and gastric juices.
Texts buried deep in the naked expanse.
Driftwood on its back, water-logged legs up in the air.
Surf Scoters dive the waves she tells me and points
to what I can’t see: a far-off we couldn’t believe.
The destruction of an entire. a toxic island of.
The horizon lengthening its unreadable line.
Written words. baggy eyes. the bagged up over
the shoulder. on a stick. the whale’s a mammal.
songs of whooping heartbreak. audible elegies.
the tide goes out
the tide goes out, becomes sand etched by pronged feet,
the lines of sandcrabs and illegible seaweed, nothing else
along the water’s edge and out across the stretch of sea
staring at it is an event in itself, just standing, staring
at the incomprehensible distance beyond, across,
and to what’s out of sight, the leafcutter bee going extinct,
the snowy plover, pale with patches, a black eyebrow line,
endangered, as the rivers and estuaries where it nests
dry up, disappear, I’m standing in a line of complicity
reaching forward and back, 7AM the highway behind me
The western snowy plover is a small shorebird, about 6 inches long, with a thin dark bill, pale brown to gray upper parts, white or buff colored belly, and darker patches on its shoulders and head, white forehead and supercilium (eyebrow line). Snowy plovers also have black patches above their white forehead and behind the eye. Juvenile and basic (winter) plumages are similar to adult, but the black patches are absent. These birds nest above the high tide line on coastal beaches, sand spits, dune-backed beaches, sparsely-vegetated dunes, beaches at creek and river mouths, and salt pans at lagoons and estuaries.
light where it is and isn’t
mercurial light waits on later hours, metallic, liquid,
earlier we are dull, fogged into the indistinguishable,
yet sticks of dry grass matted to a single wash, a-swarm with bees,
seeing them in the petals lit by sideswipes stuns us,
and the absence of various subspecies in concrete form,
how much room we take up, how much air we breathe in,
how many hills taken by roofs, how much light obscuring darkness
and the stars, Orion, Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper, Canis Major
Martha Ronk is the author of 12 books of poetry and a collection of short stories, Glass Grapes. Her most recent books are The Place One Is (Omnidawn 2022) and A Myth of Ariadne based on De Chirico’s paintings (Parlor Press 2022). Her work is included in the Wesleyan series of 21st century women poets. She taught 16th and 17th c. literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles.