Poetry is Robert Foster's fourth career. He has been featured reader many times in Southern California, Boston and New York. He is facilitator with Nita Donovan of the Saturday Afternoon Poetry Workshop at Beyond Baroque in Venice. Publications include Spillway, Night Roses, Rag, Athelon Journal, Creative Living, Ten and Newton.

Boston born, Foster attended single semesters at Harvard and Boston Universities, but graduated from The Bishop-Lee Theatre Academy to become an actor. His first Broadway role earned him featured billing in the Katharine Hepburn production of Shakespeare's "As You Like It", during which he began reading and writing poetry and attending readings on the play's nights off.

After directing stage plays, he shifted to television dramas and documentary films at NBC and ABC in New York. For NASA and the U.S. Information Agency he wrote, produced and directed many TV films on American culture and science for overseas viewing. This included some segments filmed in Bolivia, Brazil, Egypt and Canada for which he won Golden Eagle Documentary Film Awards and a Brotherhood Award from The Association of Christians And Jews.

But Bob finds poetry more fulfilling than any of his other careers.

BY-PASSED

Dropped
spread-eagled
falling through flames
to a river on fire.
Green cotton shadows
scrub
swab
slice to the heart
as I float downriver
on a funeral pyre.
Twisted roots
of a riverbank elm
echoe image
of arteries blocked.

In a veil of smoke
a strip of vein
stolen from
a thigh
is scissored in half
stitched
to vessels
open and clear.

Blood floods in
powers up the muscles
and the sound;
the sound is horses

pounding the earth.

DEAR READER

A bird. A phanerogamic bird,
circles, stops midflight,
dances a rustiform flurry.
Dives like a trugaly arrow
at a question mark in a cilicus desert.
Calfactorious claws hook into the flesh
of a screeching, wriggling
quagga,
caught on its dangling fosdic.
Six quick pecks and the mess
is enormous, all lictorial fibers
finger food
for the leucotome ants.

Nothing frontentis about it
this is a world of talleyrand wings
hairy harmattans, and end-of-the-species
millesimals, that leave no bones
to dig up. I'll record them all in a
quadrinominal multicentennial videotape.
Copies free to
Paleontologists, macrobiologists
feline and canine feel-good psychologists.

Plus a prime print
to
my undecillion
Alice.

TO A CHERRYSTONE CLAM

Rounded blade firmly inserted,
gently I pry your shell open, salivate
at you're small innocent body, so moist
and slippery.

Lips to edge, I suck you in whole and alive,
tongue you in circles for a whirl of ambrosia.

A soft squeeze of Adam's apple
and you're swallowed unchewed:
Nude Descending Esophagus.

What can I do for you now?
My wish is to lick to a slick porcelain
glaze, the inner walls of the shell

I was the first to open.

© 2007 Bob Foster