Richard Foerster

 Egon Schiele’s Cell

 A blanket rucked with troubled sleep,
 the splayed shell of it cupping a fiery pearl:
 the gift of a single orange which he claimed

 was the only light—though sometimes I want
 to imagine his lover Wally’s spread thighs
 or the rugged hull of her body on blue-black waves

 bearing the treasured cargo from a tropic grove—
 the scent so focused in my mind it overwhelms
 the chamber pot, a bucket rendered in four deft arcs,

 squating almost unnoticed beside the pallor
 of the bolted door. His folded jacket, a wash
 of earth-hard browns, his only pillow. He dreamt.

 He writhed. The orange blazed within
 the lime-washed walls where he spent weeks
 at the mattress’ edge as on a precipice

 with charges pending. When did that light
 finally gloom with mold or self-pity’s hunger
 sink its nails till the soft flesh bled?

 The judge released him to the future
 irony of a conscripted life and early death
 from Spanish influenza. Now he is nowhere,

 yet everywhere encrypted in that empty cell—
 my embering beacon for nights I lie awake
 and find myself nestled on that bed.
 

 At Uluru

 Off-season, before any tour bus would arrive, the desert
 seemed a theater all my own, its house lights dimmed. I waited

 on a bench with the Southern Cross and Coalsack overhead.
 Around me, spinifex bristled beneath the wind. I could tell you

 Aboriginal lore about that great rock, how a serpent dreams
 of an everywhen atop the dome, but in real time, on the stage

 of this poem, the sun as expected lit its flare; molten ferric reds
 descended to the desert floor. I sat in awe, a speck on the brightening plain

 and thought I’d gotten all I’d come for, until I spotted a dot beelining
 toward me out of that vastness—a mere sparrow, no threat, coal-black above,

 snowy below, it settled on the tip of my shoe, then cocked its head and flashed
 a white eyebrow, questioning, questioning. When its tail began to joggle

 side to side arrhythmically, I bobbed my foot. It would not go. A half hour
 I pondered that flicking semaphore, its flares and twitches, and registered

 nothing but a tourist’s amusement. A local elder when I told him
 said, “Tjintir-tjintirpa, Willie wagtail. He brought you a message
 

from the otherworld.” I sobbed right there. Why am I writing this,
 twenty years on? Oh, envoy of bewilderment, what is it you have to say?
 

 Hamburg

 She was adrift in that city she’d left three decades before,
 the phoenix still ashen amid rubble and fire-black walls,
 so much forgotten or gone, even St. Nicholas Church,
 where she almost cried, seeing it reduced to a skeletal tower.

 Her boy was six and amazed. One aunt lived in a bunker;
 another in a Quonset hut with a coal-fed stove. The alien
 child became his mother’s guide to each sibling’s home,
 a quick study with the map of the U-bahn’s tentacled lines.

 She’d given him a leather purse with marks and pfennigs
 to pay their fares down and up into Hamburg’s dieseled air.
 Atop every stairway, kiosks flared with flowers in tiers
 higher than his head. He was willful, and nuzzled the scents,

 then haggled bouquets—always snapdragons, scarlet ones—
 too cute for the ladies to say he offered not enough
 when he unzipped his purse. Those Löwenmauler roared
 all that summer for the aunts and uncles and adorned

 the hotel suite where the mother indulged her boy
 with coloring books, wind-up cars, a harmonica
 she’d beg him not to play while she soaked in the tub
 to sponge away the city’s grime. She’d tell him to fine-tune

 instead the Blaupunkt’s glowing moon-green dial enshrined
 among the vases, until she’d catch him watching, then shield
 her nipples as best she could, each of them, mother and son, red
 as those fierce-lipped blooms, suddenly stunned with the taste of prey.
 

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. Other honors include Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize, a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships. He lives in a former Nazarene church in Eliot, Maine.