Brett Foster
(USA)
Memento Mori, with Summer Fair
On the message board, Theosofest poster
for next week’s fair. It touts “The Influence
of Our Future” and other sessions, free of cost.
The past signs off on us with signatures
either opulent or ruinous. But whence
our lives from here on out? There is no cure,
meant narrowly, and so of course the future
haunts our decaying hearts. If we stray
past immediate, a single holocaust
is waiting for us all. It makes one pensive.
It hunts us, or we’re driven on our own
by every second — and glad ones, even those –
toward some mortal corner, baleful sixth sense
beyond the senses, hard and logical way.
Is that what the sunny poster means to say?
I confess, I want a peace that overflows
the formula, carried to the final figure.
Let’s anticipate instead a dark scene,
fair enough, but also one that’s somehow swaying
in front of us, inviting from where we’ve been
to some place fully realized, more serene.
Did I mention it’s so inviting, so assured?
Imagine walking around in a kind of relay
of the wise, among a host of cheerful tonsures.
I think of the “second naivete”
Of Paul Ricoeur, accepting, safely arrived,
anchored just off the outer banks of our lives.
We’ll be contrite, sufficient in our knowing,
self-left in good ways. Emboldened, we’ll lower
the rope, receptive to the motions, that most
welcomed of internal states once given
to comfort Adam, late in Paradise Lost.
Happiness, Carolina Highway
I tried to sing falsetto
amid the pine and palmetto.
I had a golden god’s bravado,
made bold by my Eldorado.
The Thing He Knew the Best
was the galaxy of professional wrestlers
slammed headlong upward into
a boy’s zodiac. These fierce constellations:
Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, Manny Fernandez,
whose bloodied flannel shirt the boy
retrieved one night as if it were a relic
of suffering, of work, of manhood traveling
from armory to rural armory,
one unforgettable night in Higginsville, MO.
And Harley Davidson and “Rowdy” Roddy
Piper, and the fabulously rich and
platinum-blond Rick Flair, NWA champion,
Jove-like silver belt across his chest— Whooh!
And Tommy Rich, also, also
blond but gentler, somehow, in this world
of menace and battle royals and blood.
(A sculptor friend from Charlotte
once saw him, normal, unconflicted,
out of this histrionic orbit; he was at the bank.)
The boy could not have known
that he had missed already, as in so many
things in this life, the golden age of the thing
he knew best. They were the myths
that gave his love meaning: “Monster” Eiffel
Tower, aka Andre the Giant from Grenoble
(a fact learned from a mail-order trading-card
set purchased from a coin- and stamp-dealer (no stanza break)
in northern Minnesota), seven-foot-something
Andre the Giant who was so sweet
and lovable in The Princess Bride, assisting
Wallace Shawn like a still-noble manchild,
(his imaginative progeny was Zeus
from “parts unknown” who fought in the late ’80s),
or Iron Sheik with his Persian Clubs and anti-
American taunts a decade ahead
of the hostage crisis— he once had been a body
guard to Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi
but ultimately met defeat at the hands
of Sgt. Slaughter, who the annals say
“gave new meaning to the word ‘violence,’”
but the defunct was reborn Phoenix-
like as Ayatollah in the recent Darren Aronofsky
film, Aronoskfy who personally loved Brooklyn’s
“Polish Power” Ivan Putski, famed for his “Polish
Hammer” move and his ringside singing.
He especially loved that Hammer singing
through the air. Of course this reminds us all
of Edward Spulnik, Polish Apollo, aka Tarzan or
Hercules or Wladek Kowalski, but most of all
as Killer Kowalski, the name assumed
after a drop-kick ripped the ear off Yukon Eric.
(Later that night, he visited his nemesis
in the hospital, and they laughed
at the savage, lovely absurdity of their lives.)
He would become the premier villain.
They threw pigs’ feet (no stanza break)
at him. One woman stabbed him in the back.
Away from the action he became vegetarian,
and worked for childrens’ charities,
where dying boys or ones growing up knew
he had pinned Andre the Giant in 1972.
He later founded a wrestling school
in Salem, and died, teamed with boys dying, at 81.
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Brett Foster is the author of The Garbage Eater (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011). A second, smaller poetry collection, Fall Run Road, was awarded Finishing Line Press’s Open Chapbook Prize, and is forthcoming. His writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Books & Culture, Cellpoems, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Common, IMAGE, Kenyon Review Measure, The New Criterion, Pleiades, and Shenandoah. He teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature at Wheaton College.
http://www.wheaton.edu/Academics/Faculty/F/Brett-Foster