Nevada City, CA poet Molly Fisk is the author of Listening to Winter, #4 in the California Poetry Series from Roundhouse Press, a letterpress collection, Salt Water Poems, a spoken word audio tape, Surrender, and Terrain, a chapbook written with Forrest Hamer and Dan Bellm. She's been awarded fellowships from the NEA, the California Arts Council and the Marin Arts Council, and won the Billee Murray Denny Prize in 1996. She teaches privately and with UC Davis Extension, and edits The Healing Woman, a newsletter for adult survivors of child sexual abuse. Molly's web page, Salt Water Poetry, is at www.oro.net/~molly. These five poems are from Molly's book Listening to Winter, just out from Roundhouse Press as #4 in the California Poetry Series.
Hunter's Moon
Early December, dusk, and the sky
slips down the rungs of its blue ladder
into indigo. A late-quarter moon hangs
in the air above the ridge like a broken plate
and shines on us all, on the new deputy
almost asleep in his four-by-four,
lulled by the crackling song of the dispatcher,
on the bartender, slowly wiping a glass
and racking it, one eye checking the game.
It shines down on the fox's red and gray life,
as he stills, a shadow beside someone's gate,
listening to winter. Its pale gaze caresses
the lovers, curled together under a quilt,
dreaming alone, and shines on the scattered
ashes of terrible fires, on the owl's black flight,
on the whelks, on the murmuring kelp,
on the whale that washed up six weeks ago
at the base of the dunes, and it shines
on the backhoe that buried her.
The Language
As a child in California I did not learn Spanish
like everyone else, the practical language.
In college I studied Norwegian, carefully placing
the l 's out on the end of my tongue,
letting my hesitant breath swirl around them.
l as in melk (milk), flink (clever)
l as in velkommen til Norge
Whenever I could, I turned north--
toward the cool blue eyes and red beards,
the wooden ships and churches, reindeer,
cloudberries, snow.
reinsdyr, møltebaer, snø
What is the longing for all light? For none?
Like every heroine, I wanted to understand my life.
Whether or not you believe in coincidence,
and whether or not you like it, the word sex
in Norwegian still means six.
If everything is a sexual metaphor,
and if the Vikings populated two continents
by raping the native women, and if my father,
whom I still love, sailed to Norway
and brought me back a patterned sweater
before I was even born, if he was the one
who wandered into the wrong rooms at night,
where the inhabitants could not protest
because they didn't speak the language,
then why would I try to learn Spanish?
Surface Tension
It's like the instant your canoe tilts
over the edge, the way it hangs
for a beat or two, reluctant to leave
calm water, then shoots forward
to meet the rapid, the second
after they've fired the rocket into the air
on the 4th of July and it hasn't opened yet,
it's just one dot of light, you hold
the silvery shower of stars behind your eyes,
remembering last year, childhood,
just for a second, until it blooms,
like the moment when, tangled
in a half-lit room, he comes
and you're watching him, the hard breath,
his back arched against your palms,
the way he cannot stop his legs from shaking.
Red River
It's true, I could hold you
after a night of laughing, say,
watching Montgomery Clift
and John Wayne trail their cattle
through Mexico, southern Texas.
And when the movie's over
and the rinsed dishes are shining
in the drainer like the faces of good children,
the wine bottle set by the back door,
glowing faintly green in the dark,
nighthawks will scatter their sharp cries
into the streetlamp's yellow halo
and the moon will begin her steady
descent, and you'll find your way somehow
inside me, tonguing my breasts, gently
closing my eyelids with the calloused tips
of your fingers, bending me
backward over the sofa's ready arm.
But it's not enough, I want you
closer. I want you to pull me inside you,
open your warm skin like a raccoon coat
and wrap it around me, I want to inhabit
the tightening muscles, curl up in your dense,
well-marrowed bones, feel what you touch,
roll the gold vowels of my own name
around in your mouth before they're spoken,
our blood drifting down through the same
dark river, mingled together. I don't know
which is worse: coming, or watching you come.
Couples
Hold on to what you remember,
this exact summer, everything unchanged,
the blue Ford Falcon with its handle-crank
back window rolled down driving
the green length of Argilla Road,
all the cousins under ten then,
eight of us crammed into the way-back
singing Day Tripper, singing Can't Buy Me Love.
We are salted and sandy, shreds of brown kelp
still caught in our bathing suits,
the melting ice cream cones already
thrown out the window; we are baked;
we are quarreling and happy.
The desultory remarks of four tired parents
float over our heads and into that summer:
they are thinking of gin, and tonic,
and four o'clock volleyball, getting the kids
washed, shucking the corn and feeding them,
do we have enough hot dog buns, stopping
at Aggie's for another pack of cigarettes.
The muscular fathers, up in the front seat,
are trading old jokes and both looking forward
to the low-backed sleeveless cotton dresses
of the other men's wives and our mothers know it,
but nothing is wrong yet, everyone's cheerful.
© All Copyright, Molly Fisk.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.