Molly Fisk: California Poets Part 8, Five Poems
January 8th, 2025
California Poets: Part VIII
Molly Fisk
Five Poems
Toronto
I was in a taxicab in Toronto
once, an empty freeway at night
heading from the airport to a hotel
downtown as I did in those days,
and I'm sure the driver was white
because it was so cold and I never
thought, as I would have then,
what is it like to be black and cold?
Don't black people want to be
warm? Thoughts I never knew
I was thinking, the white noise
of an unexamined life on white
American middle-class autopilot,
though one of my bosses at the bank
was black, and it never crossed
my mind to wonder if Chicago
was too cold for her, she was a person
to me for better or worse depending
on my loan performance, a woman
in a herringbone coat who changed
from pumps into white Reeboks
like I did, or fur-lined boots if
it had snowed that day, to walk home
in — not a stranger — flakes thick
in the air in a pyramid shape under
the street lights, the quiet crunch
of a passing car as its tires bit
the accumulation, that funny way
snow can be dry when it's newly
fallen, whereas this night in Toronto
it was plowed up against the guard
rails and the cab's wheels slished
on the wet asphalt like a forced
whisper. The driver used a phrase
I'd never heard before, Emmylou
on the radio and me saying something
just to be human, to show that I
appreciated the ride, about her voice
or the album, who knows? And he
laughed and said She can leave
her shoes under my bed any time.
It was one of those moments
that men and women can sometimes
find, in the dark, on a job, that are
stripped of desire but full of a shared
understanding of desire, intimate
and universal, both, and accidental,
but so strong you remember them
thirty years later. I can see now, looking
back, that this was the beginning
of my end as a banker and of my turn
toward language, though it would be
half a life again before I recognized
white was also a color.
Old Men in Cafés
and how they just have to keep talking,
sentence after vague sentence, because they are men,
an attempt to connect but interrupting whatever
you're thinking or writing at your out-of-the-way table,
a breeze bearing off the pandemic germs and what
you missed most in isolation, the sense of belonging
to your own town, a human among its kind,
didn't include the memory of these overly-loud voices,
the bluster and cheer, or how to find compassion
as the sound grates into your ears and the line
is lost, the focus. You know it's another face of love
and a hope to be part of art's making but braided through
is the maddening assumption that women must listen
to men, the expectation of attention, that we will
put down our pens and smile, parry the jovial remarks,
that we won't risk seeming unfriendly. I am not
unfriendly, I am working. Show some respect.
Einstein's Theory of General Relativity
Because I can waste a whole day
feeling sorry for myself, or smug
about something I won't remember
three weeks hence, and I don't
want spring to come either,
it's too soon for the cacophony —
my people, I blame it on lineage,
come from a northern clime
and need another month to gather
what's left of our hibernating psyches
into something resembling common
sense — I have to imagine time
as ocean: vast, deep, cold, tidal.
What Margaret Sanger might have said
in retrospect washing up on shore
to join Basho's ink pot, Agamemnon's
favorite horse, a trilobite, an apple
pie, my mother's French blue cardigan
from high school that she always
missed, the way light cuts the Arno
in old photographs of Florence,
some clay beads alleged to have been
strung on the first known abacus,
low boots from Lapland sewn
of reindeer hide where the hair faces
against the direction you're going,
for traction. At night when sleep is long
in coming, I lull my synapses amassing
lists like this to undermine chronology.
In the dark, the daffodils are blooming.
Coastal Safety Regulation
Lifeguards rescue tens of thousands of people from
rip currents in the U.S. every year. N.O.A.A.
My mother drew a knife flat across teaspoons of cinnamon.
Her skill was exactitude, directions to the letter, a dishtowel
over one shoulder so she could wipe her hands as she went,
pulling the albumen from its little hitch on the eggshell's
inside surface, creaming butter with an old wooden spoon.
My father's omelettes turned into scrambled eggs every time,
mushrooms and sausage thrown over his shoulder into the pan,
a handful of cheddar, some thyme, sizzling while he stood
grandstanding, inventing a story about Achilles and Patroklus
or Genghis Kahn making breakfast for a thousand men.
The only way to escape a rip tide — two currents that meet
the shore from opposite directions and pull you straight out
to sea — is swim laterally until you get beyond their strength
and can turn toward the coast again and make your way in,
relying on stamina and buoyancy and yelling for help
because this is how people drown.
Epithalamium for Wildfire & Dry Timber
Clearly passionate — short-lived and incendiary — bright
as day but hotter — ember-cast a prediction of son and daughter,
a warning. No future — barring smoke, whose particulate matter —
bluebird primary, bench seat of abandoned Chevy Blazer, bobcat
dew claw, chipmunk whisker — will rest securely in the lungs
of their wedding guests forever after. Hear, hear! A toast
to the glowing couple — may ladder fuels surround them, no
inversion layer, no night breezes down canyon dampen their ardor.
Author Bio:
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.
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