. . . . so koukla, all is death + darkness
. in this ravishing bright day.
. —James Merrill
Pivot, fulcrum, the moment like Anubis’s feather : and the heart-
heavy planet sinks toward another inevitable dark. Ironic
that I should invest myself in darkness like a sacramental robe,
here, beneath this nave of ancient oaks at 5:14 a.m.,
a celebrant of solstice light. But what can come
of ceremony? No escaping “the situation of our time,”
the bullets, the bunkers of despair a hemisphere away,
the despot’s crimes. And yet again I wait for a rising wind
to louver the broad green limbs and open blue portals
as if to summon me through and up into those airy absences
I once believed in—certainty, patience, hope. A rustle in the leaves
portends its own ravishing afterlife. Of this, too, I am aware.
Richard Foerster
Richard Foerster’s eighth collection, Boy on a Doorstep: New and Selected Poems (Tiger Bark Press, 2019), received the 2020 Poetry by the Sea Book Award. Foerster’s other honors include the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, Poetry’s Bess Hokin Prize, a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships. He lives in Eliot, Maine.
