Three Poems by Molly Fisk

Rest

She loved him most afterward,
late at night when his arguments
softened, drifted into wider
concentric circles, stone of his curiosity
flung haphazardly into the pond,
rippling out to an uneven shoreline
of cattails and willows. His breath
warming a single spot on her back,
his voice the sound of water making
its way across a stream bed’s mottled
gravel, catching the day’s last light.
The occasional chuckle, a half-finished
kiss, the way his fingers relaxed
along her folded arm: ease, balance,
companionship, safety, rest.

*

Who I Am in Twilight

Myself again, still, always different
from the day before but similar,
essential: the way a lake is mostly blue
but turns deep green, turquoise
at the shoreline, ruffled then glass,
steely under clouds, glinting copper
when the sun’s lengthening path leads
west into the pines, or white-capped
under April winds. Civil twilight,
that momentary stay from ill-will
and misbehavior as I imagine it,
the first six degrees our star disappears
below the horizon, a few sacred
moments before dark when we take
a long breath and let the complications
slide away, watch the shadows rise
and the vee widening behind a young
family of mergansers turn to mercury,
to sable, to blue-black, to night.

                *Al Young’s title

*

Cedar Waxwings

Here’s a day with so much
to do but no appointments,
an empty calendar,
blank, open, I didn’t hem
myself in by scheduling
look for cedar waxwings
and the recycling bin knows
I will not abandon it.
Where does the time go?
Do I really hear the basil
leaves calling for picking
and pine nuts knocking
around in the fridge?
I am waiting. Stalling. Ripe
to feel something but not
yet, my heartbeat calm
no trembling hands or shallow
breath. I want my brother
to wake from his coma,
lose his respirator and smile
despite a sore throat and a week
lost to twilight sleep, his body
slowly repairing itself
while the rest of us pray.

*

Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, her new collection Walking Wheel is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Fisk, who lives in the Sierra foothills, has also won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.