the road to Foster's place

The road to Foster's place is 2.4 miles 8 minutes with traffic. But he's not there anymore. He's here. One of the things I wanted to do while passing through Eugene was look up David Foster, emeritus professor of art at U of O, because of his influence in my life. I remember visiting David on my way back from taking the professional knowledge test in Portland, just after moving here from England. I was the first person at Southern Oregon offered this quick method of proving you were qualified to teach. They weren't set up for the test in Ashland yet, so I had to drive the six hours north. Now I'm hesitating because I can't remember how it turned out we went to breakfast together...and he paid, which I appreciated, living on substitute teacher pay and my wife's three part time jobs at the coffee shop, the used clothing store and the bagel shop. On the way to breakfast David was talking non-stop about opportunities, how I was like a prairie dog sticking his head up through the surface and looking around. Things looked good. While he was talking I remember thinking about Ezekiel sticking his head through the clouds and discovering heaven's machinery, the gears and cogs and how everything worked. David was like that, as curious and fearless as a child, with all the wisdom of someone who'd been through the war and trained up with the Bauhaus movement, to name a couple. We crossed the street, first waiting for the crosswalk sign to illuminate. Nothing was sacred or really you could say the opposite of David, everything was sacred. I said Aren't you alarmed at these modern judgement saving devices, or words to that effect. Like being told when it was all right to cross a road, whether there was traffic in the street or not. He looked at me and said, I pick and choose, and that's one I can live with. I'm okay with that. I'll be happy to wait for the all clear. There's other things I do where I make my own judgements, but this is one I'm fine leaving to the city.

When I first met him he came literally vibrating with quiet energy and force into our small college. I saw him right away as my revered teachers' mentor. He ran a film class in the evenings and it was well attended. He began with hand-painted frames, moved through Fritz Lang and Orson Welles and on from there. I'm not a film buff in any way, but he gave me a grasp on film's antecedents. Elsewhere on campus he supervised the building of the dark room where I would later spend hours alone stirring Russell Kaine's photographs around for the yearbook.

David had a sort of Hemingway appearance, with the teacher's shrewd eye, turning everything you said or did into an opportunity to learn. He was I would say swarthy, a working artist. Back at his house after breakfast, I noticed the lights went on each time we entered a room, and went out when the last person exited. Typical David. His house was basically fully packed with computer gear and art project materials, a printing press in the basement.

Over the years we exchanged Christmas cards. His were always homemade. A piece of wisdom along with one of his fascinating sketches. He was internationally known for taking his modified VW van out into the wild and running photographs through his computer and then to a kind of sketch pad he devised. It was like a marriage of what he'd seen and what he wanted to illustrate. He had a kind of Chinese landscape sense of economy and his work was beautiful, frame-able. And of course I was honored to be included in his mailing list, which must have been vast.

The thing is I can't remember when I stopped hearing from David. We moved states and I attributed not hearing from him to that break. So now I'm hear and he's on my list. I touch his address in my contact application and the journey to his house looks like a brush stroke with some angularity reaching into the east. But for some reason before setting out I enter his name in Google to discover that David G. Foster died in 2003, on the shortest day of the year. He was 78.

He was killed crossing the street.

I'm heading out of town now, over to the coast where I'm going to do some writing and some walking. Maybe I'll take out my iPad and do some sketching in David's honor. I'm just sticking my head up through the surface and looking around. It's a beautiful day and you're never too old to cry for an old friend, but would they want that? Time to move on, glad I knew him.

Getting the Rooster

My God! My God! Has it always been so?
Walking to the kitchen for a drink of water
and coming back with fish tagine leftovers.
Take the other day. I went down to the fenceline
swearing under my breath I'd get that rooster.
Every morning the call to prayers at four dark
by that feathered tin trumpeter in the guava.
How many times I stood clear of his backside
hands on my hips like my old grandmother
muttering promises to cut his scratchy warbling
and dismantle the acoustic tunnel that amplifies
his broken serenade right up to our own bedroom window
and other post-neolithic thoughts on hunting
for reasons other than food. So I reach the scene
bend under the weeping bamboo and behold
the makings of the male of the species who on seeing me
tries to run through the small squares of the cage
by defining the inner dimensions of the rectangular cuboid
with his feathery mass and some rather potent instincts
potent because instinct caromed off my own instinct
while captor and captive eyed each other
as if the horizons hadn't been stitched together
with telephone poles and sagging wires quite yet
and the background roar was not really a motorcycle
but a rather greater point of view who might
quickly reverse the situation with me suddenly
defining other sorts of dimensions and so on
but I was not interested in the kill certainly not.
Did he know this? If so he had a strange way
of showing his understanding of relocation
by speeding up till he became a brown blur
with a bit of red in it.
There was a moment when I hesitated I must say
as I studied his diminutive crest and asked him
are you a chicken or da kine? which is local for
"really annoying rooster who crows at godawful hours of day or night"
when to my horror—I do have some left after a lifetime
of intermittent exposure to American television—
I saw the zebra dove belly-up on the floor of the trap.
If I needed further proof I had my man this was it.
I promptly loaded my victim and his victim
into the back of my black pickup though in a pang
strapped the cage down for the ride
and high-tailed it up to Pu'u Hue—a nearby deserted mountainscape
well known to catch-and-release volunteers like myself.
The shabby counterfeit of Chanticleer and I gave each other hard looks
before I set one end of the trap against the wide gate
slid open Freedom's door of twisted wire, watched and listened
as the creature threw caution and dignity to the wind
and waddled furiously in the straightest line
I've ever seen taken by a bird on foot, almost to the horizon
clucking and hiccupping from clump to clump of thick grass
and I stood there marveling awhile at high cirrus clouds above,
painted bark eucalyptus lounging on their elbows below.
The air seemed pure and clean. My conscience likewise.
I turned for home key in hand sensing a sharp pang
as if the absence would never replace the palpability
of direct experience as if I had sown the seeds of separation
and now all there was left was what? The post mortem
wondering if I'd gotten the right guy? How would I know
until I lay awake that very night listening for something
to return? Unless something had never left.
But the cage was not empty yet.
I shook out the dove. Getting down on one knee
I noted the surgical hole over the heart.
Even if that wasn't the right guy
I'm glad I got him. Or was I? Or did I?
It was me lured them both in the trap with scratch from Takata's Store.
I cast the innocent victim into the long grass
and went down the road without looking back.