By Richard Foerster



	Nec mora, percusso mendacibus aere pennis
	abripit Iliadem.
		—Metamorphoses X, ll. 159–160

It was May, windows open, the sublimity
of lilacs had arrived, commingling, soundless
as thought or touch when I awoke hearing
that great horned owl perched among the oak’s
lower limbs—at eye level, like an omen
come to pose again its one clichéd question.
Past midnight, who else would care to hear or see?

Both my parents went deaf, my mother blind,
confined to the cavern of her self her last five years,
and, in other ways, long before. So when I sensed
his figure emerging from behind the staring eyes,
I sat in the dark and turned the CD player on, almost
too low for me to hear the adagio of a favorite symphony
yet leave my love undisturbed in the half-empty bed.

But there it was, palpable, despite the music: the memory
of a touch tousling a sleeping boy’s hair, synaptic black
and static, his cry toward a distant room cut short.
When that music finally eased itself into silence,
I saw the blaring eyes were gone and heard, not far,
a nestling gripped in the taloned hush of that raptor’s wings.
Nothing more. A blessing in which I was adrift.


~~~~~

Richard Foerster’s ninth collection, With Little Light and Sometimes None at All (Littoral Books, 2023), was a finalist for the 2024 Maine Literary Award in Poetry. Among his other honors are two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. He lives in Eliot, Maine.