Richard Foerster: “I Watched from My Adirondack Chair”
I WATCHED FROM MY ADIRONDACK CHAIR
I watched from my Adirondack chair
an osprey prowl the lake, like a mind
circling, then looping back to hover
over some dimly perceptible idea, so still
in that moment near dusk, pale
as a first star to pin a wish on.
No surprise, no buckling into ecstasy
when the bird jackknifed to thrust itself
talonward and shatter through the glaze
to where a perch perhaps was drifting,
cognizant of what?, when the luster of its sky
collapsed under that advancing weight,
like the thought that gaffed me while I sat
with forearms firm against the hard planks.
Ungainly the silhouette that razored
the surface. Its wings slapped like wet sails
to reclaim any least gust of air,
too stubborn to let go a lashing burden.
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. Other honors include 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. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Notre Dame Review, Tar River Poetry, and River Heron Review, among others.