This week’s poem appears here offseason – it brings us to a warmer time when there’s a rainstorm after a long period of sun. The title refers to the smell after such a storm. As the poem beautifully shows us, that smell is not “attar,” an essential oil made from rose petals; it carries the scent of organic material being broken down for plants – a scent we are perhaps predisposed to love.

Richard Foerster lives in Eliot and is the author of eight collections, including “Boy on a Doorstep: New and Selected Poems,” recently published by Tiger Bark Press. His honors include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and two Maine Literary Awards.

Petrichor

By Richard Foerster

Six storm-wet buzzards

wait among dead boughs

of an ancient pine,

 

their ruffs plumped like Flemish

collars to shield naked rose-pink

heads; lumpish, brown,

 

they hide inside themselves,

honing patience as an art.

Wrapped in windless gray,

 

what is resurrection to them

if not the day brightening

to its usual interplay

 

of shadows and light? Soon

all six will lift wide their wings,

let them hang like linens

 

on a line, shedding a weight

that would forestall their rise

into sun-warmed currents,

 

the scent they know so well,

that rich decay which we mistake

for attar and greedily inhale.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is a poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2019 Richard Foerster. It appeared originally in “Boy on a Doorstep” (Tiger Bark Press, 2019) and appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.

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