Martha Ronk, The Place One Is

 

ANOTHER COUNTRY

The it in with-it shifts & pivots as a compass needle

vetch, clover, brackish seaweed in heaped up smells

bits of pulverized shell, skeletal casings underfoot

fog banks stoked by fires in the central valley,

scrims cover what yesterday stood as branched trees, a

house barely visible—more memory than memory,

unheimlich as if and as if it had been or could have been

you whom I turn to in near-sleep stumbling over ourselves,

whose arms and legs was it I thought you called

extracting the changed angle between two norths

a skeleton of rusted car seams laid out on the beach

each step unlinked from the one before

each detachable makes up this country I’m pointed into

With more than a dozen published books to her credit, the latest from Los Angeles poet and fiction writer Martha Ronk is The Place One Is (Oakland CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2022), a collection of prose structures, each of which attend to the line even through her use of line-breaks. She centres her America across the length and breadth of her sense of California, offering the elements of her geopolitical and historical space as a stand-in for far larger, ongoing concerns of colonialism and the Anthropocene, as well as considerations of how geography is constructed, where one sits and where one needs to stand. “Ordinary bits of light on neighborhood leaves,” she writes, to open the poem “NIGHT: A PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT ADAMS,” “trees passed by, // spattered not-very-white on a random number of them, // the canopy of leaves wide enough to hold multiple bits of light // and what I can’t help is how pulled I am into the lights as if my eyes // could focus on multiple places at once which I know they can’t [.]” The structure of her poems is centred in the prose-block, and her narratives work to stitch together untethered fragments into a larger quilt of individual patterns of commentary, including elements of history and ecological concerns. “the place one is is the place that is one,” she writes, to open the sequence “PULLED INTO EARTH, AIR, SKY” early on in the collection, “—nowhere else / and although I can think myself back into some places, / where one is is the only place and everyone’s feet / change underfoot as wet, sand, concrete, pebbles and smooth / operate as adjustments or the particular tree out of the window / one branch hanging down [.]”

There are moments that Ronk does describe two sides of geographies, suggesting the place that one is sits in a space simultaneously unknown, offering two elements, two perspectives, on a singular and multifaceted whole: a place of beauty, suffering, constant possibility and perpetual self-destruction, including that of, as Brian Teare writes as part of his back cover blurb, the “devastating impact of settler colonialism on the Wiyot people of Northern California.” “collected in multiples    piecemeal and over time,” she writes, as part of the poem “SCRAPS OF INDIGENOUS HISTORY,” “stitched with fishing twine    housed in museum vaults // the ongoing    catapulted into waters moving out to // unfinished sentences [.]” Or, as the opening poem, “TO LET GO,” begins: “imprecise morning as if limbs were only loosely threaded in the coming // and going of tides, in flattened grazing land extending into beach sand // going on until far out of view, the imprint of a foot then another, // the time it takes for a seeded oyster basket to mature [.]” It is interesting how Ronk offers line breaks as sentence or phrase-breaks, composed as breaks of thought as opposed to  breath, which allow the accumulations of her sentence-phrases to pile on like logs into a cabin, constructing the house of the poem, such as the poem “LEAVING IS ALSO A PLACE,” that begins:

Leaving moves into us, taking us from this place

where we are and from the place we’re going

into some third bi-furcated in-between

as a swollen door doesn’t quite close,

no furniture floats around the rooms

but all groundings are weakened

tattered bird wings droop from the poles