Molly Fisk: Heading home

ducking under the last heart-shaped yellow birch leaves,

past the mottled white bark, stepping lightly off the curb

over a stream of this year’s first real rain as it scours the gutter,

feeling the shape of an ordinary street rise beneath your boots —

Commercial St. — and then drop again on the other side,

as if you had crossed a small hill unknowingly, which you have,

without effort, coming into the quiet presence of a wall of bricks

someone laid and mortared that still stand in even rows despite

a century’s passing. This is and is not a Wendell Berry novel,

a Mary Oliver poem. This is one block of a California Gold Rush

town with a bloody, tree-less history, known mostly now for pot

and a kind of rueful quaintness, where people you love

have died and been buried, have been born.

© Molly Fisk 2018