Richard Foerster was born in the Bronx, New York, the son of German immigrants, and holds degrees in English literature from Fordham College and the University of Virginia. His eighth collection, Boy on a Doorstep: New and Selected Poems, will be published by Tiger Bark Press next spring. Foerster has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize, a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships—as well as two Maine Literary Awards for Poetry. Since the 1980s, his work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, The Southern Review, and Poetry. He has worked as a lexicographer, educational writer, typesetter, teacher, and editor of the literary magazines Chelsea and Chautauqua Literary Journal. For the last 32 years, he has lived on the coast of southern Maine.---------
Nocturne (with Incubus)
What’s this that roots
in bedrock,
this weight that clots
the air
and thrusts
its clamor
down in splintered
chords,
this naked song,
this sweat
that rains upon
and pocks
an alien soil,
this hornet’s
drone trapped
inside
the brain—come then,
I’ll surrender,
rip night’s silk
from my body,
break me
like thunder
till I’m swept
in your cascade
beyond all need
of translation.
He Built a Cloister
He built a cloister from shattered stone
of an old order, a pillared peristyle,
hewn foursquare, with a fountain
at its center, in constant argument
against silence. Whenever he walked
around the water’s splintered light
he’d listen to his footfalls reverberate
up from within the uncharted quiet
up from within the uncharted quiet
between each step. He was tempted
to spend his remaining years like that,
in monkish counterpoint, immured
from the world’s savaged splendors
and seek at every turn some deep
perspective on the infinite—was then
the artesian flow began to chide him
in a voice sequestered beyond sound.
perspective on the infinite—was then
the artesian flow began to chide him
in a voice sequestered beyond sound.
Sgraffito
Octopus Jar, by Tim Christensen
Portland Museum of Art
Portland Museum of Art
These cephalopods drift rooted in absence,
an ocean scraped away to chalk-white
ground; they are what the burin let remain:
fearsome black, a glaze of swirls;
theirs is the rhythm of chaos uncoiling
toward caress, and as quick entangling
any eye that would unknot their eight-
fold intimacies; try to counterclock
the potter’s spinning orbits of clay,
back to the leather-hard bisque,
the brushwork underglaze, the pure
pulp of being taking shape; then see
how they stare out at us, gesturing
from the first kiln of creation.