IN A LANDSCAPE OF HAVING TO REPEAT

IN A LANDSCAPE OF HAVING TO REPEAT

In a landscape of having to repeat.

Noticing that she does, that he does, and so on.

The underlying cause is as absent as rain.

Yet one remembers rain even in its absence and an attendant quiet.

If illusion descends or the very word you’ve been looking for.

He remembers looking at the photograph,

green and gray squares, undefined.

How perfectly ordinary someone says looking at the same thing or

I’d like to get to the bottom of that one.

When it is raining it is raining for all time and then it isn’t

and when she looked at him, as he remembers it, the landscape moved closer

than ever and she did and now he can hardly remember what it was like.

Martha Ronk  (369)

            Martha Ronk’s poem, In a Landscape of Having to Repeat, playfully uses language as way to juxtapose presence and absence. Like a landscape, Ronk directs the reader’s awareness throughout the poem using language, tense, and repetition. With the line, “or the very word you’ve been looking for” Ronk cleverly acknowledges her own writing as a tool to represent memory. This image, simultaneously forcing the reader to become aware of the space between this poem and the memories it describes.  Her use of repetition, within lines and throughout the whole, creates a rhythm for the reader to follow and form. Successfully Ronk draws connections and distances, building layers of meaning and of space within her words, within this landscape.