Molly Fisk
USA

Molly Fisk is a writer, writing coach, and radio commentator, the author most recently of The More Difficult Beauty, teacher at www.poetrybootcamp.com and www.voiceofyourown.com, and NEA fellow. She lives in the Upper Yuba watershed on the western slope of the Sierras at 2,500 feet.
 

Singing Canyon Sonnet


 
I have to say something about the blue grasses by the side of the road,
the red rock rising behind them, a lacy kind of scrub juniper,
yellow-green in afternoon light, dotted here and there up the broken slope

 
and walls scraped sheer, the red striated with bars of gold and brown.
I have to tell how two greasy ravens startled from their perch
made a raucous noise in the slot canyon. Their cries bounced upward

 
magnified by a hundred where I had just been singing Amazing Grace
and they had not stirred, the only hymn whose verses I reliably remember.
My boots raised puffs of fine red dust behind me walking back to the car.

 
I should mention that the aspen leaves were thumbnail-sized and vivid,
that anvil clouds quickly overtook the sun, that before I saw those thirty-seven
white-tailed deer I was feeling unbearably lonely and I might as well confess

 
how acutely I miss the man I left at home even though I drove
two thousand miles away from him to figure out which one of us to love.

 

 
(previously published in A Bird Black as The Sun, California Poets on Crows and Ravens, Green Poet Press, 10/11)

 

 

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