This is a love poem from Edward Foster's chapbook, Boy in the Key of E. The poem is called "not wishing to offend":

                               I like you
                                though I wish your hand
                                were somewhere else.
                                I mean there was
                                a time when you looked
                                just as
                                good to me, at least
                                your jacket did.
                                But then you went away
                                and time went by.
                                Perhaps there's something
                                I could show you
                                on the porch.
                                Where did
                                your jacket
                                go?

Again: What does the poet or speaker (is there a speaker here?) mean by "though I wish your hand / were somewhere else"? We probably interpret that sexually, but the sexuality is as ambiguous as the word "like." If the person (male or female) has his/her hand on the speaker, then wishing the hand were somewhere else suggests a desire for less intimacy. If the person's hand is not touching the speaker, then it might suggest a desire for more intimacy: "Touch me here."

Another question: Has the speaker changed his/her opinion of the person addressed? We are told that "time went by." Often the passage of time lessens the desire for another, and while that suggestion is present—especially given the book's epigraph from William Bronk, "Do you care that time is irreversible?"—the opposite seems actually to be the case: "there was / a time when you looked / just as good to me." Does that mean "you look just as good to me now as you did then"? It might, though the logic of the syntax tends to suggest the opposite meaning: "there was a time when you looked much better." In any case, the speaker immediately qualifies the assertion: "at least / your jacket did." Did the person addressed look good only because of his clothes? The jacket returns at the end of the poem when the speaker asks, "Where did / your jacket / go?" Are those lines an assertion of disappointment? Does the absence of the jacket mean the absence of some essential quality of the person addressed? Does the speaker's desire not to offend ("not wishing to offend") mean that he can only assert himself indirectly? He seems to be open, frank: "I like you." Yet what he says seems to get darker and darker.

Indeed, "jacket" may have autobiographical overtones. Foster wrote a short autobiography for Gale Research's Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (volume 26). In it he tells the following story:

I remember very little about that year [in Pittsfield, Massachusetts]—and nothing that was happy. My strongest memories concern my brother badgering my mother to buy him leather boots and a black denim jacket. Finally, she gave in. We had very little money, so these things were considered major purchases. They were also things I'd wanted myself but had been afraid to ask for.
Children do not fully understand the secret language of clothes, but the fascination is there, and I envied my brother for getting the things I wanted myself. It was as if he were becoming the person I wanted to be.

Does the jacket in the poem refer back to the jacket—a kind of fetish—in Foster's autobiography? It's possible. In that case, the person addressed would be Foster's brother, Roy. Perhaps, after a period of separation, the two men are now at home: "there's something / I could show you / on the porch"—the poet is showing his brother something about the family house which has changed. Does this mean that the erotic reading is wrong? Children "showing" something to one another is often erotic.

We can begin to answer this question by addressing the theme of "seeing," which is present but somewhat muted in this poem. (It enters by way of a slightly ambiguous line ending: "there was / a time when you looked.") In an earlier poem, "saturn," it is much more dominant: "he is the one I watch and so am seen." The "speaker" of that poem is identified with Acteon, the mythological hunter who looked upon the naked Diana and was torn to pieces by his own dogs as punishment. "Saturn" involves a man seeing something, but the transgression here is slightly different from that of the classical myth. This "Acteon" is not looking at a woman but a man. Like the classical myth, the poem is clearly erotic; like "not wishing to offend," it centers on a "hand" and on touching: "The hand that reaches toward his shirt can feel his touch."

But there is more at issue here than homoerotic desire. In the concluding line of the poem we learn that the object of the speaker's desire is his father, whom the poem identifies with the mythological figure, Saturn, "THE KNOWING, KNOWN LOVER WHOSE FESTIVAL DECEMBER 17TH WAS THOUGHT TO MARK THE END OF THE YEAR" : "O father," Foster writes, "what color will I see within your shirt tonight?" Evidently the transgression this "Acteon" commits is an incestuous wish: a sexual desire for his father—though of course he remains "not wishing to offend."

There is more to "saturn," but remembering just this much of it suggests that desire and the family are deeply connected in Foster's mind—or, at any rate, in his book. "I wish your hand / were somewhere else" may indeed be erotic—like the assertion "I like you"—but the "jacket" may well be the one in the story about the poet's brother. In fact, Foster's brother may be functioning here as a kind of substitute for his missing father, who, we learn from the autobiography, died when the author was quite young. The longing in both poems may be a longing for someone who is absent, not available ("But then you went away / and time went by"). Both poems are perhaps essentially fantasies of presence: the "you" addressed is, precisely, not there, and the poem, ostensibly asserting the presence of someone, is filled with reminders of absence and distance: "there was / a time," "But then you went away / and time went by," "Where did / your jacket / go?"

More might be said about "not wishing to offend," but this at least gives a sense of the kinds of issues and complexities which arise in Boy in the Key of E ("E" presumably, at least in part, for "Edward"). For purposes of explication, I have referred to a "speaker," and certainly the poem encourages us to experience its language as the utterance of a single "I," an individual ego with a particular history and psychology. In "not wishing to offend"—as throughout the book—the word "I" repeats, as if to emphasize this point: "I like you," "I wish," "I could show you." Yet, despite our excursions into Foster's autobiography, we know little to nothing about this poem's "ego." The poem is not a "dramatic monologue," the sort of poem Robert Browning wrote; nor is it a polylogue, a poem of many voices like The Waste Land. Though we know almost nothing about the poem's "I," the poem in no way suggests that the "I" changes. What we are dealing with here is a situation created almost entirely by language. The poem's density arises not through its assertion of the complexities of an individual psyche but through its assertion of the multiple, and at times contradictory, meanings of its words and phrases: in a way, it is language that is the subject—not just the means of communication—of this poem. The poem is an assertion of the primacy of what Foster calls "saying":

                                   I am the carrion boy,
                                and up on the roof
                                are the angels and I
                                and all of them
                                do as I say.

In one sense, that is a statement (an ironized one) of total control: everyone is under the command of the "carrion boy," has to do what he "says." Yet, in another sense, it is a statement about the power of language—and only about the power of language. The "angels" and "all of them" are, in effect, made up by the carrion boy; they exist only in the mode of "as I say," can "do" only "as"—while—"I say." Writing about Jack Spicer, Foster remarked, "Essentially what he and others whom I admire require is that the poet abdicate any self-conscious control over the words." The poet's psyche, even his biography, may be present in the poem, but such things are secondary: what is primary is "the words." "Not wishing to offend" is a powerful exploration of "saying," of what "abdicating self-conscious control over the words" can do.

In his autobiography Foster writes, "There is a masochistic pleasure in finding that whatever one has thought natural and inevitable is only another construction." The word "masochistic" is irrelevant here, but the rest of that statement applies very well. Foster's poems deliberately place us in situations which are nothing but "constructions," in which we are intensely conscious of the fierce interactions between constructions. Identity itself is of course such a construction. (Foster has taken a number of pseudonyms.) In the concluding couplet of the opening poem, the word "I" echoes the word "Imagined"—something we would probably not even notice were it not for the opening lines' play on "theme" and "them":

                               Veneration's not my theme;
                                I want to answer them.

Another theme which is important in this book (and we might remember that "veneration" is etymologically connected to "venus") is the theme of music, the theme of "themes." Foster at one time studied music, and so that is part of it, but there is more. Music haunts this book in all sorts of ways, and beyond music is the fact of "sound":

                       "Images without their proper sound"
                        sounds insincere. But so he said.

I mentioned earlier that "saying" repeats throughout, but in literal fact Foster is not "saying" anything: he is "writing." And writing is a visual art. His "words," his "images," are indeed "without their proper sound." The awareness of the silence of reading is a deep issue of twentieth-century poetry, but it is particularly linked in Boy in the Key of E to an all- pervasive sense of absence. Reading Foster I was reminded at times of certain passages in Paul de Man—of this from Blindness and Insight, for example:

[This] statement about language, that sign and meaning can never coincide, is what is precisely taken for granted in the kind of language we call literary. Literature, unlike everyday language, begins on the far side of this knowledge...It is always against the explicit assertion of the writer that readers degrade the fiction by confusing it with a reality from which it has forever taken leave...All nostalgia or desire is desire of something or for someone; here, the consciousness does not result from the absence of something, but consists of the presence of a nothingness. Poetic language names this void with ever-renewed understanding...Here the human self has experienced the void within itself and the invented fiction, far from filling the void, asserts itself as pure nothingness, our nothingness stated and restated by a subject that is the agent of its own instability.

Writing of his "boy"hood, Foster remarks that "when I was twelve and became an adolescent, I was fearful, as children at that age often are, that people around me could hear the terrible things in my head." Simultaneously erudite, puzzling, evasive, and revelatory, Boy in the Key of E is a fascinating examination of the self as nullity, as absence, as "agent of its own instability." In writing, Foster found a way to let people "hear" the "terrible" things in his head while at the same time maintaining his distance. In their delicate interplay and precarious balance between presence and absence, what his poems "say" is precisely the vanishing of the world:

                               Perhaps there's something
                                I could show you
                                on the porch.
                                Where did 
                                your jacket
                                go?

Jack Foley