Two
poems from Molly Fisk's The More Difficult Beauty
followed
by a note on the author
Rowing,
November
The
way the body wants to pull its own weight,
hands
curled around the shaft of the oar, drawing it clean
through
bitter water as blood rushes out the doors
of
your capable heart and cold air billows into both lungs,
the
release a kind of violence, oar’s brief rest
as
it’s feathered, skimming on air and then the quick
turn,
the catch, and it grips its width of river again,
the
body in love with use, flat back muscles tight over
shoulder
blades, all the bones of the wrist steady, your arms
pulling
hard and straight, fingers curved loose but ready
to
grip if the oar hits a pocket of air or a branch,
submerged,
if it scoops a rat’s sodden carcass up to the surface
as
you pass. You unclench your teeth but set the jaw
in
concentration. The plates of kneecap slide across their ends
of
bone as the big thigh muscles contract, relax,
begin
to shake with joy, doing their work. Frost glazes
the
drooping willows. Black-crowned herons
rustle
on their secret branches, ready for sleep while your eyes
search
now for the first flare of light to smooth
the
curves of the undersides of bridges, sheen of sweat
across
your brow, the body’s prayer, and steam
escaping
in puffs from your parted lips, hips
balanced
an inch over water, the narrow boat
surging and
gliding into another winter.
Washington
Square – New York, 1941
When
Edward Hopper finishes his painting for the night,
sets the boar bristles to
soak in turpentine, wipes the thick
not-yet-crusted-over drips from his smock
with a blue rag
and tips his palette up to incubate tomorrow’s luck,
he
isn’t thinking of the greenish light from a street lamp,
how it hits plate
glass and fractures through it, or the counter’s
corner in an all-night
city diner. Most of the time
he is just hungry, already smelling the stew his
wife
likes
to make from white beans and bacon. His eyes lose focus,
and his other senses
– so long ignored in deference
to saturated color
– come alive, more vivid now
because of their confinement.
How clear the little click as
the
lamp’s wick sinks below its silver mouth, scritch of bootheels
on the
tile stair when he descends. He inhales the evening,
the butcher’s bloody
work, stale malt that drifts from a window.
The snowy world receives him: flakes
melt and run down his cheeks.
©
California
poet Molly Fisk is the author of Listening to Winter and Salt Water
Poems, and of a CD of radio commentary: Using Your Turn Signal Promotes
World Peace. She's a commentator for NPR and community station KVMR-FM Nevada
City. Molly invented the popular Internet workshop Poetry Boot Camp (poetrybootcamp.com),
teaches creative writing at U.C. Davis Extension and the Sierra Nevada Cancer
Center and gives talks around the country on creativity, feminism, and change.
She's a National Endowment for the Arts fellow and has won the Dogwood and Robinson
Jeffers Tor House Prizes, among others, as well as a California Arts Council grant
"Rowing,
November" first appeared
in the
anthology Cloud View Poets: Master Classes with David St. John (2006);
it was also featured on the Radcliffe Crew's 30th anniversary webpage. "Washington
Square – New
York, 1941" won the 2007 Dogwood Prize, and was first published in Dogwood,
May 2007. n
