Molly Fisk: Elegy (for Leah)
At times a woman half-way through a door looks like the one who jumped last winter from the highway bridge, her car a different color but otherwise like mine, abandoned in the public lot, her body found months later down river floating near the dam. We stood together once on stage — her infinite soprano and my street drawl voicing words that could depress a saint, though never who by water, a line Cohen borrowed from the Jewish recitation, which neither of us exhaled through our parted lips to join the motes turning slowly in the spotlight's golden shaft. But we heard it. And — perhaps the only time we truly spoke — agreed backstage that it was holy.
Copyright 2020 Molly Fisk
Molly Fisk’s books include The More Difficult Beauty (Hip Pocket Press, 2010).
