By Richard Foerster

The music forming my work is my own life,
its blessings, its curses: in order to rediscover
the song once sung by the soul.
		—Letter to Leif Aare

I forged the music with a blacksmith’s hammer,
made it ring white-hot as the sparks that seared

my childhood. Booze-fueled fists had showered down
when I bought, at ten, a violin despite my father’s

reform-school threats. From our basement flat
with window bars, its daunting prospect

of a Stockholm slum, discordant chords flew up
to embrace the faintest starlight of a mother’s hymns.

***
After rheumatoid arthritis crimped then crippled,
confining me unstrung to a fourth-floor walkup,

my viola lay coffined in its case, inviolate.
Imagine Dante crossing Styx, the vessel borne

ever deeper through the dark, the waiting gates
of Dis emblazoned with disfigurement.

Who is this man who dares, while still alive,
To journey through the kingdom of the dead?

***

Hearing on the radio tonight my Eighth,
it is as Beckett said of life: a shivering expanse

to the sound of waves, storm and calm,
the claws of surf. And I am drawn forth, still

in that oarless skiff, but by a different music’s
silver thread—incorporeal, abstract, intense,

without beginning, without end—a body
ebbing into the soul’s more visceral song.

~~~

Richard Foerster’s ninth collection, With Little Light and Sometimes None at All (Littoral Books), received a Gold Medal at the 2024 Independent Publishers of New England Book Awards. Among his other honors are two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and Poetry’s Bess Hokin Prize. He lives in Eliot, Maine. This poem is dedicated to conductor Christian Lindberg and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra.