Two Poems by Molly Fisk

Winter

Again the time of replenishing,
         the slowing down to rest — low-angled
sunlight, early darkness, late dawn.
         Repairing all that’s been used hard:
screen doors, work gloves, the mind
         with its lightning-fast calculations, your heart’s
wide roaming, so steady, pulling you along.
         A calm to oil the gears and joints, smooth
the planes, recover contentment and satisfaction,
         practice not racing anywhere, sleeping late.
Restoration, synapse and cell. Your body
         and its hunger for solitude.

*

Presence and Silence

For a week now, Red-winged blackbirds in their hundreds
swarm the un-leafed-out-yet Blue oaks, their trills deafening
and neither color visible from where I stand looking up
though I know the names, and what can they be eating?

A storm, the first in too long, is pretending to roll in,
the sky darkening and then alight again, fickle, indecisive.
How long will I stay rooted in the driveway? Nowhere I need

to be til 4:00, memorial for my friend who died too young,
which I’ll attend for my friend, his mother. About death,
I have nothing left to say to anyone. My living body
in the room supports whoever needs to not feel so alone.

*

Molly Fisk is the author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, and edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology as an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her historical novel-in-verse, Walking Wheel, will be out in April from Red Hen Press.