Richard Foerster
award-winning poet and author of eight collections; has worked as a lexicographer, educational writer, typesetter, teacher, and editor of the literary magazines Chelsea and Chautauqua Literary Journal; received 2020 Poetry by the Sea Book Award, Nation Award, Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize, a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, and two Maine Literary Awards for Poetry
Winter Solstice
how quick the plummet : moon-sharp the flint-sparked air : our river crackling on the full extreme of the tide : how pristine this burden : snow coiled like a widow’s shawl about the shoulders of the world : how
numbly we face this whiteness : its weather-worn scars : our fading trajectories : like scavenging deer : and into it all this rodent-thought creeps its way out of troubled sleep : a crosshatch of tunnels : vascular runs
where hunger follows blindly on hunger : gnaws every tender tendrilling : brutal and indifferent : like beauty : like this night’s shimmered desolations : like a body : blanketed yet beneath : so nakedly vulnerable :
how inexorable these silent turnings : as one from a window : back toward the darkened room : and returning : the thought : of you : downed in sleep : as the tide of a sudden snaps the solid mask of things :: how quick the widdershins flesh tinders into flame.
from River Road by Richard Foerster (Texas Review Press, 2015)