Molly Fisk

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Because I Will Be Leaving Soon

 

driving east on the loneliest road 

in America by myself,

over its 17 mountain passes 

between four and nine thousand 

feet higher than every sea, heading 

toward the longtime home 

of the native Anasazi who came 

before the Pueblo, to the last Mormon 

hamlet where mail arrived by mule-train, 

a record held through 1933, one year 

past my mother's birth, I'm paying 

close attention to wisteria blooming 

pink outside my bathroom window,

at certain times of afternoon its color 

somehow reflected on the shallow 

porcelain sink. My mother would want 

to paint its dripping racemes, the fat 

black and gold bees entering, drinking.

The thought of leaving alerts me,

tunes my senses to precisely 

where I stand, as if not to lose myself,

as if to remember who I am.

 

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I go back in my mind to many poems, usually ones I've memorized, and sometimes one line but sometimes the whole thing. The last stanza of Robert Frost's “Reluctance,” is one. My college boyfriend suggested I learn it by heart, and that was long before I became a poet. Ah, when to the heart of man / Was it ever less than a treason / To go with the drift of things, / To yield with a grace to reason, / And bow and accept the end / Of a love or a season?

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Marie Howe's “Part of Eve's Discussion,” whose first line is so nicely complicated: It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand /... 

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The opening of Sharon Olds' “The Promise”: With the second drink, at the restaurant, / holding hands on the bare table, / we are at it again, renewing our promise / to kill each other...

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Mary Oliver's “Wild Geese,” which led me to poetry in the first place, even though it's become so over-exposed now. You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

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Looking at these examples I'm seeing sentimentality and music in the Frost; an effort at specificity about something hard to define in Howe; the hallmark direct, matter-of-fact shock from Olds; and in Oliver's line a clear authority. Those traits are present in my work, alone or in combinations, a lot of the time, and this is where I learned them. Or maybe because I wanted and still want to write this way, I was drawn to them.

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—Molly Fisk

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൪uartet is an online poetry journal that features the work of women 50 and over.

To view our issues and submission guidelines, please visit www.quartetjournal.com .

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