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Molly Fisk: Lapsed Unitarian in Mormon Country
In Season
Spring’s leafing out is orchestral,
not to ear — merely a flutter —
but for the eye: bright fingertips
green as new frogs, overtaking
the plums’ white blossoms, coral quince,
magenta crab apple, the year’s
vast unfolding in strict chaotic
order: almond, peach, Gravenstein,
Bartlett, old trees someone planted
on our less-than-half an acre.
By the time my additions open —
fig, persimmons, pomegranate —
the mountain ash and maples wave
too thickly to see beyond. Some bird
shat a mulberry seed whose skyward
reach is nine feet now at least
and equally wide, for perfect shade.
We welcome random luck, even
the stained porch boards because this
purple fruit’s a mess, the brittle branch
the wind brought down in March.
Secret oasis with a line of Harleys
blazing by, a neighbor’s ardent rooster,
and the carnal new frog descant
our own rainbow.
~~~
Lapsed Unitarian in Mormon Country
That restless feeling on the last day, your friends exploring
slot canyons, vague threat of rain but clouds scudding too high.
Cattle beside the road sandwiching a fence. I remember
learning in college how New England held their livestock in
but farmers in the southern states fenced them out.
This could be socially relevant but not as far west as Utah.
Silly to draw conclusions from a 2 p.m. lecture I heard 48 years ago.
The other snippet was Northerners laid out a grid system for their towns
with housing lots, church, and dry goods around a common square
for grazing, right angles far as the eye could see, while in the South
they used “metes & bounds” a method of walking around drawing lines
however you wanted, skirting a swamp, including a copse of vigorous
pecans, and ending up with a plot that had no visual symmetry.
As the child of generations of Yankees I still envy this approach
and it scares me. License, permissiveness, no rules at all! Hell.
Without constraint, how can you rebel? The altitude here has made me
woozy and nostalgic. And the wind. I want to go home and I don’t.
700 miles alone in the car is a mixed blessing. Tomorrow I’ll cross
the Hogback and the Escalante, past the entrance to Bryce with its swarm
of top-heavy tourist traffic, down the coral Red Canyon to Panguitch
and Beaver, coming up by midday into the Great Basin where God,
according to legend, washes His hands.
~~~~
Copyright 2026 Molly Fisk
Molly Fisk is a poet, radio commentator, life coach, writing teacher, painter of barns and mason jars full of water, mentor, speaker, feminist with a capital F, political activist, sister, aunt, cousin, godmother, honorary grandparent, not-very-old elder, swimmer, former banker, one-time sweater designer, long-walk taker, rearranger of furniture, color maven, nature lover.
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Molly’s bio note is as capitvating as her poems. I’m suffering a serious case of artistic envy overridden only by admiration.
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Luray: I caught that very same flu, seven poets back. Is there a cure? Surely nothing “over the counter?”
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Aha — definitely linked lineages, then. I’m still waving. 😉
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Both poems make me feel ALIVE! And “As the child of generations of Yankees I still envy this approach and it scares me. License, permissiveness, no rules at all! Hell. Without constraint, how can you rebel?” made me laugh in recognition. I want that spring and its “vast unfolding in strict chaotic order”
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Waving from one Yankee to another. 😉
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I am not a ‘Yankee’, Molly. I am a strange mess: a German-born Brit with also Peruvian nationality. But I recognize the sentiment: a German will always somehow have straight and orderly lines in his/her DNA 🙂
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I love these poems, especially “The Lapsed Unitarian…”—a concept, which in itself is funny to this lapsed Catholic. I love the poem’s vivid imagery, the cow sandwich, the copse of “vigorous pecans,” her echoing sounds in that and many other phrases, and especially, her ending in the Great Basin, and explaining its divine purpose. Just brilliant.
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Thank you! I can’t remember when I began to say lapsed Unitarian, maybe 20 years ago, but when people ask how you can possibly do that I tell them just to turn off NPR. xo
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Lovely music in these poems both home and away, I especially enjoyed revisiting Utah roads I used to drive so often.
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Thank you. That landscape is so astonishing, isn’t it? I marvel every time, and keep going back every couple of years.
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As I completed morning meditation, I looked out at the new peach tree —first pink flowers and tiny fruit before the leaves. Each fruit tree must have its order of bursting out and I assume I will have to remove some of the fruit on the tiny tree to ease its burden. And oh, Utah! Tashi was 6 months old when we stayed there on our way back to California from Kansas. She was carsick from the twists and turns, but had so much energy then when we hiked to Calf Falls. That was when the strange B&B host told me I had cancer and sent me off to the charlatan who recommended all his concoctions—yes I fell for it. That was well before the real cancer and in a different spot, the host saying somehow Tashi was worried about me. I have so many beautiful memories of the trip, so many photos of the grandeur that that woo woo stuff just adds a little chuckle. Thank you for the beauty and the memories. Such a wonderful poet.
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Wow, a flash nonfiction, Barb. Thank you!
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What energy, tone and LIFE in those poems!
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Thank you!
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Such delicious details of image, sound, and thought in both. I am ready for spring.
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In Pittsburgh, we had a blizzard yesterday. I’m ready for Spring as well. And yes, Molly’s poems are rich with sight, sound and intelligence….
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These 2 poems are quite different from each other but alike in that they’re both rich with images and ideas. They both drew me in.
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Oh yes, I’m always engaged by Molly’s poems…
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Oh God! Molly! What a poet! Every word and notion is alive in your line, I think of them as eloquent strands of fence, of such careful manufacture, and trust they will not rust and crumble to the ground over time. I often have to replace what should’ve lasted—so called “new wire”—that ruined so quickly, far too early but these poems stand—gleaming like fields of grass in light, and as long as there are beautiful lands out across the way and all they contain, there will be Molly Fisk poems.
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Thank you, Sean! I love the fence mending detail of new wire.
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I always wondered what the Great Basin was for. A bowl for God’s hand washing. Beats the hell out of a skate park tube. These were enjoyable poems. A little travel early in the morning.
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Thanks, Al. I admire Molly’s poems.
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