Richard Foerster


A Few Words Respecting


I have yet to say a few words respecting … mystery; … namely, that nothing is ever seen perfectly, but only by fragments, and under various conditions of obscurity.
—John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing (1857)

~A Vanity

Old man, with your boobs and bellyflab,
dingus not worth a tug a tongue a diddle;

doughy, scruff-cheeked, puff-eyed
crop of pallid scurf and bleb—look!

Ablute absolve ablate, remake the wrack:
muster an imago from my luster’s lack.

~A Samara

Watch me, child-eyed:
      the gig as yet is whirl,

a swanning grace-
      fully to ground;

though doomdrawn now,
      count my fouettés

as you once did, how each
      uncoiling winged

through too-brief intervals
      of air. I free-fell then

to fertile soil. Those years
      between lie stoppered

far within. Have you forgot
      that dormant seed?

~A Sheet

Though sebum- semen- sweat-stained with the skin-flaked tangle
of decades twirled in dream, I am still your crib and canopy,

the cotton bond on which you imprint the full weight
of your being, the unsullied light you must close your eyes to see.

~A Cascade

At the ever
                 inevitable
neural brink
                    I am
                            foremost
a fluid veil,
                  vascular,
unbidden,
                 bearing
the silted
              tonnage
                           of cradled skies

until my thunder
                           spills
into scintillance,
                          here
before you,
                  a blossoming mist
born of the distances
                                 I’ve come
to enshroud you
                          in radiance.
Now
        breathe me in.

~A Testament

If I say I’ve said
inflecting tense from is
to was, if I say I am will be

what’s done, tilled and tallied
the harvest in, though
for show as yet there’s none,

not boon nor merit but this
cache I clutch and now let go,
in trust, I give it you from me,

inked and sealed tomb-tight
as writ. Old man, my legacy
is what you make from it.

 

Richard Foerster’s ninth collection, With Little Light and Sometimes None at All (Littoral Books, 2023), received a Gold Medal at the 2024 Independent Publishers of New England Book Awards. Among his other honors are the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships—as well as two Maine Literary Awards for Poetry. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, The Southern Review, and Poetry. He lives in Eliot, Maine.

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