Martha Ronk: California Poets Part 9, Five Poems

Martha Ronk

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Martha Ronk

Five Poems

a scroll like water, water like a scroll

what the mind does in making this into that, taking me where

I am not, creating scenes out of rectangles, some sea in it—

thus I’ve ruined what we were making in a walk you and I,

lost in the 17^th century painting of silks I saw before me,

coastal ribbons of wet unlike either land or sea

where the moon pulls away water, a line of the littoral

viscous as kelp from the sea, slimy between fingers,

loop over loop, touch is for skin we too often wear indifferently,

the immediate walk fading as this fan-shaped scroll recreates water

that atmospheric fog rising over a turbulent sea, Price: USD 3800,

a seal reading Kansai, who allowed the paint simply to fall,

a silvery orange or blue, colorrain every which way

Japanese Black Pine

One question always leads to another as to why in a state of no wind

a tree’s branches ever so slightly back and forth, my poor eyesight

and skeptical frame of mind: must be me, something wrong on this end,

nature following the certain laws we tend to abrade

unless again the mirroring effect takes over and I sway

to its music and put away the book on preparing for the future

taking up the shore pine or the Japanese black pine

its lichen fringe blowing in the nonexistent air now rippling the Bay

the unanswered question of why in separate sections, the darkening

on the surface being the one in question and so it spreads

and I wonder again why the Ceanothus on one side only has died

why we find we must lean on the tree for reasons other than

pressing hands gratefully into deeply fissured, irregular bark.

Sunset & a painting of fire

The painting of changing light stills the change, time lies across the horizon.

The head of someone in front of me tilts to the side, resting on what isn’t there.

A moment languishes its green so foreign to the radiance as light goes down.

Why lying on the floor melts a spine, I can’t think, it’s a wooden act of

across, a word I mistype as my fingers pull toward a future unknown to

whoever thinks it. Change makes its inexorable moves as she lifts her head,

then joins others moving slowly away towards parked cars.

They are done although the sky works on smudging itself in smoke

having nothing to do with fire although paint often lights a ship

on fire next to a flaming sky. I look at her as she holds her head up

carrying balance across a valley as if it were full of seeds, the future.

Turner: the skies sketchbook

Made of the same atoms produced by clouds billions of years ago,

we retain a molecular memory of hexagonal carbon atoms as ice crystals,

quartz crystals, basalt columns so we’re told and thus must try to envision

more than an individual artist and any graphic portrayal of a model

and a green baize chair or even some more cubist rendition

as sheets of striated fibrous wisps float somewhere outside the frame

of our limited brain capacity unable to fit all into relation despite a study

of geometry now so antiquated that it seems a folly equal to a Victorian manse

left to molder and fall to ruin as even as now I hear a crash in the forest.

trees open to light—hallucination

I want to explain to you this move into where I am,

but vacancy hovers, breaks the large furniture of forests

the underbrush growing around inadvertent steps,

getting on with it and the next day and formulating

the necessary and sitting on chairs in which I’ve never sat

but there I am swinging weighted feet, heavy limbs,

as a kind of unadulterated awe opens the trees to light

in itself something to reckon with, splashing here on clover,

there on pine needles or on bark beholden to nothing

as the dark forest is, the darkness I can no longer see in

so completely given over to an acrid smell of damp,

as it spreads and dissipates, its petty pace one’s own

Author Bio:

Martha Ronk has published a collection of short stories, an ironic memoir, and 13 books of poetry, most recently CLAY bodies+matter on ceramics (Omnidawn 2025). Transfer of Qualities was long-listed for the National Book Award; Vertigo was a National Poetry Series selection; in a landscape of having to repeat won the PEN USA best poetry book. Her work is included in the Wesleyan series of 21^st century women poets; she received an NEA award, and attended artist colonies, Djerassi and MacDowell. Several of her books focus specifically on California, A State of Mind and The Place One Is. At Occidental College she was the Irma and Jay Professor of English Literature and coordinated the creative writing program.