Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize Honorable Mention, selected by the NEPC Board
The Hours
Matins
Who could have told him that
eventually this morning would come
like a bellclap herald shouting
through the sleepy square. That the rooms
would brandish writs of eviction,
and his pillow, grown weary of embrace,
withhold its comfort.
That talons would claw again
at the eyes of an ivoried face
wavering above the basin
and the workplace sing in the distance
a plainchant thin with age.
Who should have warned him
that the rigid soldiers of lost intentions
would troop along his walls, rank
upon rank in faded jackets, and begin
a silent dress parade of things
long forgotten or unread.
That the telephone would gasp
into the morning without reprieve
the same empty mechanized voice
and that only a smudged glass at his bedside
would hold forth without question to the end
its last trembling dram of courage.
Lauds
The waves’ insistent shushing in the cove.
A lone gull on a rooftop
hacking at the gray sheets of the fog.
Nothing sings in this white-
hot furnace. Words fly up like ash.
What icons to honor, what votives
to keep. A briefcase snaps like a reptile.
A doorlock booms like a drum.
Engines hum amid static. Let them be shamed,
let them be routed. The sunlight burns
through the distance a lustrous void.
We are delivered by wonders.
Prime
See them in procession, stately
in the harbor’s dim nave-light,
trailing thin wreaths of incense:
boat after boat seeking
a thrash of light, the heavy
haul from the deep.
On the last vantage, where a car
has parked, a driver is sipping
the day’s first bitterness.
His chest swells and subsides, a sea’s
rhythm, easy in its agitation
after all these morning offices
in the wake of longing, subsumed
in the steady inexplicable trawl—
The ignition key turns like a knife
and burns. His thoughts flap
and struggle in the sun’s
shimmering nets.
Terce
As one by one the cubicles ignite,
already he bends above the keys
for another day’s devotionals.
Like a woman at her beads, he’s lost
in the data’s green glow, the cursor’s
pulse his own. He strides a maze
of his own making with no need for wings.
He’s fearless of each turning. He’s seen
the monster’s face before, and lived.
Sext
He lowers the sandwich to his lap
and lifts his eyes to the hills.
Beyond the parking lot, all
is glossed in insubstantial light,
shadowless and still. What help could come
from there, a place he’s never been—
a mirror to the empty air,
a terminus to man’s concerns?
It is, after all, too meager
a parcel of unremitting green.
At hour’s end a shadow creeps
from under his hand. Make speed . . . Make haste . . .
None
This is the dead hour,
time of the fluorescent buzz
swarming through the skull.
Time of the coffee cart’s rattle
in the hall, the schedule’s lapse
from grace, the flow chart’s glacial crawl.
This is the hour of the polished mask
and idle words above a neighbor’s desk.
The time of petty betrayals.
Now the geography of the familiar
blurs like an overgrown path
and the minutes reel like crows.
How to raise up, make new, and bring
to perfection these ruined Zions,
these torched fields rendered into night?
Outside his window an argosy of clouds
is setting out on ancient commerce. If only
expectations would diminish like returns.
Vespers
What if the consolation exists a priori—
not the brief salvations of the cocktail shaker,
but some unbidden artesian flow up
through the heart’s rifts? Now he views
the day’s tripwire tragedies whole,
like an orb-weaver’s web limned in the evening
definition of light. There’s an architectural beauty
to horror that makes him want to trace
its every line and curve to find the determinant
abstraction of numbers in space. He waits
for a sepal to burst before his eyes
and the awful flower unfold
its delicate purpose—like the twelve-
spoked wheel he watched once as a child,
spinning back even as it bore the farmer home.
Compline
All the day’s unpocketed odds and ends
defy the randomness with which he lets
them fall across the dressertop. The bead
he’s worried smooth between his fingertips,
his father’s watch that ticks resentment still,
the slips with numbers that he’ll never call—
each a hair stroke of the masterwork
that he can never finish. It shifts each night
with each unfolding of his hand, with things
he’s done and left undone, and yet that pattern
pooled there in the light as he turns toward bed
is all the treasure he must hope to own.
Credit: “The Hours,” copyright 2019 by Richard Foerster, from Boy on a Doorstep: New and Selected Poems (Tiger Bark Press, 2019), first appeared in Poetry (March 1992) and is reprinted by permission of the author.
In addition to an Honorable Mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize, 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. His other honors include Poetry’s Bess Hokin Prize for “The Hours,” the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships. He lives in Eliot, Maine.