from The Sofa Series
by Martha Ronk
For the sake of absolute balance, on one side
of the walkway a pink bush, on the other, a white.
Her socks match her shirt. On the mantel two candlesticks
push out six inches from either wall.
Everything's like pieces of desert paper
blowing in the wind. The motel disappears,
the road already comes undone, and beer cans litter
what's left of vacancy. On Saturdays there's no room
except the sky. Like a veneer of saranwrap the city
lies across a basin waiting to be rolled up,
taken to a new set of circumstances and spread out
for hoards of people with weapons or without.
Everyone prances like ponies, skitters like lizards.
No wonder her silver shoes, no matter her silver hair.
•
If the chair doesn't move across polished floors
and tables aren't burning with electric pulse,
if I can't glide in patent shoes over turquoise tile,
why have you brought me here?
What reason for such straight lines,
such an ill-drawn moon?
When the cactus glows at night I'll swim the length
and hold my breath until the edge of the sea.
Once, in between one belief and another, I thought
this town's at the end of all waters.
Nobody lives here who isn't already taking notes.
Across from her at the counter a cowboy reads a script
and she responds with coy laughter.
Nothing happens. We take walks. Suddenly the slide.
---------------------------------------------------
NEWS OF
by Carol Snow
another massacre; and the clean bright morning.
Keeping walking. 'Contradiction' is human -- I know that.
And 'knowing'... A stirring from the place the whirlwind -- something like
fear -- arises, and watching my breath
to still that. Suddenly thinking somewhere in the breath -- along
the breath, is an understood place. Somewhere -- but somewhere
in passing -- where the matter is reconciled.
Reading at City Lights
Thursday, July 21 @ 7:30pm
U.C. Press New California Poetry Series
with Laura Mullen, Geoffrey G. O'Brien, Martha Ronk, Carol Snow, and Juliana Spahr
The New California Poetry Series presents works that help define the emerging generation of poets–books consistent with California's commitment to the Black Mountain tradition and reflective of California literary traditions–cosmopolitan, innovative, experimental, open, and broad-ranging in their intellectual makeup. Forthcoming for spring 2005 in the series are books by Sarah Gridley, Laura Mullen, and Juliana Spahr.
You know you want to go.
