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Greek phrenitikós, frantic

Martha Ronk

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              broken, 

time stealing               & leaking the blue cold

what it would have been to be        Greek

no cortisone     a body       historians

also thought women leaky        restless        for  what

out of one’s own        skin      a future they never

knew  who’d have thought        a daily  underpass 

so many leftovers     pizza  fries           near the  parking

what skin did we come wrapped in

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

“Lately I have been unable to separate private from public agitation—my own agitation and erupting allergies from the distress around me, increasing homelessness, tents under freeways. I obsess over broken systems, cities, bodies, poetic forms. All of us wrapped in similar skin. Years ago, I read a comparison between early Greek restlessness and American restlessness and began thinking about the ways such restlessness is spread across cultures and historical eras, as well as across our current landscape and individual bodies.”
—Martha Ronk

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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

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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

Location LA

Never arriving in a city missing in locational drift
plates shifting under building facades and whipped décor,
seas rising and falling at the edge of amusements
and surf. The migrations migrating elsewhere,
monarchs lost on their way south, children coming north
in droves on their way to anywhere else.
The city of lost souls blowing in the Santa Ana winds
and people who are not us no matter who we are.
Where is she now, he asks, what ever happened to the girl
named for a saint, the one with the ankle tattoo

Martha Ronk

2015

Poems

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Greek phrenitikós, frantic

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