A blurry photograph

Martha Ronk

The tree azalea overwhelms the evening with its scent,
defining everything and the endless fields.

Walking away, suddenly, it slices off and is gone.

The visible object blurs open in front of you,
the outline of a branch folds back into itself, then clarifies—just as you turn away—

and the glass hardens into glass

as you go about taking care of things abstractedly
one thing shelved after another, as if they were already in the past,

needing nothing from you until, smashing itself on the tile floor,
the present cracks open the aftermath of itself.

Born in 1940, Martha Ronk is the author of several collections of poetry, including Vertigo (Coffee House Press, 2007), which was selected by C. D. Wright as a part of the National Poetry Series.

Themes

About this Poem

"The poem is part of a series of poems on photography and seeing; here I try to address several experiences that manifest as highly defined and also as blurry or abstract: scents, visible images, the present moment. I had dropped a glass on the kitchen floor; the azalea came from Vermont last August; a friend made a photogram of a blurry glass jar. I always wonder how these things gather themselves together and insist."
—Martha Ronk

Sign up for Poem-a-Day

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

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

Martha Ronk

2016

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

Poems

A blurry photograph

More by this poet

Greek phrenitikós, frantic

Rapture

Take #2

Poems

Page submenu block

A blurry photograph

More by this poet

Greek phrenitikós, frantic

Rapture

Take #2

Newsletter Sign Up