Molly Fisk
One More Reason to Do the Dishes
How on summer nights, to cool the house
if there is no smoke, I open the back door wide
and my neighbors fly in, beguiled by moonlight
reflected in a cereal bowl full of water
or the spaghetti pot left to soak. Moths will go
toward any shining, unafraid, not understanding,
and once wet, lose their wings’ lift and drown.
Already I carry a tree frog nightly from my sink
out to the dark, deposit him under a squash leaf,
horrified he might be napping in the dispose-all
when I turn it on. I collect the cats’ bowls
on a counter top out of reach of skunks. So far,
no raccoon, no possum, no bear eating fig and apple.
It’s a drought year: water’s valuable as gold.
I soap the sponge and rinse and stack, conserving
drops, delaying sleep, because the world
depends on ordinary salvation.
My Summer
Hanging them on the line, it’s so hot I just fold
once at the waist, a single pin. Inside-out so
the colors fade more slowly, the skirts already
billowing, When I turn to look back, there’s summer:
eight cotton dresses, two nightgowns. On the porch,
I drape the bathing suits, bras, dish towels, and panties
over chair arms, along the laundry basket’s rim
and hope the breeze, when it blows them free, which
it always does, doesn’t send them down the steps
into the side yard. And then the argument: blue sky
and we can breathe again, but this much Northeast wind
is going to fuel wildfire to cross the ridge tops, drop
into the lake basin. Our huge lake. The bear cubs
will not know where to turn, the fawns, the kit foxes.
Molly Fisk reads “One More Reason to Do the Dishes” and “My Summer”
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 won grants from the NEA, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.