Three Poems BRETT FOSTER Poet of the People If someone’s looking for me, they’ll find me working at my verses at this or that table in the public library’s back right corner. I’m still trying to make them durable enough to be heard among the snoring and murmuring of the assembled homeless regulars here. We’ve become used to passing our time together. We thoughtfully make room for one another. I have much to learn. That much remains clear. The labors I busy myself with are obscure but noble: scanning centuries for flashes of ghostly wisdom, struggling to lift the bulk as in a grain elevator, or sometimes simply marveling at the Loeb on the table, as if just for me all of Atlantis had surfaced from deep seas. arion 20.3 winter 2013 Inscription on the Ruined Temple What did this age produce? Diverting fancies that were useless, new interfaces that abused our hours (which Dr. Johnson mused were priceless) and soured us. Explanations were the most confusing. What did the age encourage? Brightly accented sadness, wages not of single but multiple hemorrhaging. It made us build a Faraday cage, mainly, to keep out the sewage. And to be alone with our rage. three poems 92 Our Nostos So long ago (he says) those newlywed days of sex and budgets, living off family’s nuptial gifts while we, uplifted, spent only our days working in bookshops, long hours in toy stores. Spent those first winter nights, on Beacon Street, in Boston, with leaden, love-tired limbs lovely and unconcerned with the self, at last, at rest on the futon bed, un-self-conscious, underneath the wedding gift of Ralph Lauren’s plaid comforter, and beneath our innocent heads, the plaid shams I’d never heard of. That bed was like an island Brett Foster 93 orienting the one room, oasis to which the single flesh nightly returned, around which the studio apartment spun, not unlike in central respects the old, olive-tree anchored, rooted bed of Penelope and Odysseus, in their earlier, briefly royal days. There, they retired nightly for rest shared, telling a day’s stories. Those were the days before the uproar and the setting sail and long, besetting war, and afterward, the indefensibly delayed return, increasingly unexpected, there to the shore of that sea-steeped island. How foolish, how truly silly he was! Unaware three poems 94 or indifferent to miles, various coasts ahead, he had no idea that the brooch would soon be long lost, sunk in the sea or bottom of the harbor. May every husband’s labor be seen for the little thing it is, worthlessly distracting or ever on the horizon, while the shroud is woven or unraveled as the candle burns down. By the time it happened, the pair had begun to take the shape of their crooked elders, grey in their years, heavy with the years between them, lost, awaiting a coming mist to move across them like the gentlest of hands. Brett Foster 95 In that tiny room near Kenmore Square we too were living through an early history we would never grasp again, never again. Broke, learning the routes to the T, we took our own young, lusty royalty so seriously, queen and king of each other’s bodies, and they were sweeter gifts by far, dearer to us than all the horses, silver basins, lampstands, all the assembled treasures of Pylos, Sparta, Phaeacia. three poems 96 ...