I’m reading Robert Cording’s latest poetry collection, What’s Possible: New & Selected Poems. In the “Selected Poems” sections, we get a survey of Cording’s long, celebrated poetic career, ranging from Life-List in 1987 through Without My Asking in 2019. Cording actually published a subsequent book that he doesn’t include selections from: In the Unwalled City (2022). The reason for this omission is that the section of “New” poems in What’s Possible continues the theme of the 2022 collection: Cording’s grief over the recent death of his thirty-one-year-old son, Daniel.

As in In the Unwalled City, the twenty-three “New” poems in What’s Possible try—each in its own way—to come to terms with Daniel’s death. Yes, “come to terms with.” Naturally, the most frequent term is “dead”/”death”/”died”, as in the opening, title poem:

                I had just finished
a slice of raisin bread when suddenly
I said out loud: He’s dead,
Daniel is dead, He’s not coming back.
Not ever. It was not the first time
I had said those exact words.
But it was the first time I believed them.

Then in the next poem, “The Book”: “Since my son’s death, I’ve read each day /

from the Book of Unknowing.” And in the next (“Elegy for a Dream”), “I am calling in the dark / and my dead son answers.” Then in “Talking”: “Sure, all night there was the hole we circled around, / knowing we could not fill it in— / a son’s death.” And in “For Acedia”:

…oddly, a bird has been
my best medicine when I find myself shrunken
and absent, as I do each year as the anniversary
of my son’s death approaches.

(The bird is a dipper, but more on that later.)

In “Barred Owl”:

It sat with an otherworldly calm,
like a god or a statue of a god

the year our middle son died, warming itself
in the late winter, early morning sun.

In the long poem “Advent Blues,” Advent is seen in the light of (in the dark of) Daniel’s death:

My son’s death arrives each morning
like a riddle I cannot solve.…

Since my son died three years ago,

I’ve been bound in the amber
of my own helplessness.…

In “Clearing Brush”:

I run the brush saw, you a weedwhacker.
Gloved hands, deer flies, briar
and poison ivy: always our dead son
in our minds as we lop, cut, and pile
the brush all summer; each October,
when the day of his death arrives,
we burn the mound we’ve built.

Whatever Cording happens to be doing, these (and even more) poems tell us, it is haunted by his son’s death.

Another reason this poem, “Clearing Brush,” interests me is that it’s one of several that are set in nature. I’ve already mentioned the bird in “For Acedia.” Then in “Larches,” nature is elaborated in relation to “my dead son”:

The green-gone-to-gold larches gilded
my view for three weeks, but now
these deciduous evergreens slough off
their needles…

Now the dark comes early, pools
under the larches,….
I wait for the dark to rise up
in me as if it’s my duty. I believe,
as much as I can, that the sorrow
arriving each evening is the hard gift
required of me. I have stood here

so many evenings, my sorrow
has become its own relief. So I wait
for the stab of love and its wound
of remembering my dead son
who I must keep from becoming the ghost
of all I do not remember. His death is
a different death, unlike the larches
that do not need me to bring back their life.

In the next poem, “Litany,” the combination of music, rain, and a dogwood tree’s flowers becomes (in a single sentence imaging the movement of a cosmos) a simile for Daniel’s short life:

Arvo Pärt’s Litany is coming to an end,
as is the rain and, outside my windows,
the first splash of sun lights the raindrops
on the white flowers of the fully bloomed
Kousa dogwood, each drop a pellucid,
concentrated planet of light in the cosmos
of the tree, which, just now, could be
the tree of life itself, shimmering
like the musical note held inside my mind
now that the music has ended,
its breathtaking incandescence like
my son’s life, which did not last long,…

A couple more poems set Cording’s memories of Daniel in nature. In “Ladybugs,” his son “would die in mid-October / with the ladybugs’ arrival, with fall’s gold // leaf light and candelabras of sumac.” Then “Purple Martin Houses” begins with a detailed description of the flight of purple martins he’s watching—which, inevitably, moves him to reflect:

I sit here nightly as if this in-between
is somehow connected to the in-between
I’ve lived in since my son died,
waiting for the last martins to fly into
the apartment complex of gourds my neighbor
erected in her back yard. I try to imagine
my son’s spirit flying into what Charles Wright
playfully called Home sweet home in a poem
about swallow nests.…

Taken together, all these poems give the impression that there’s nothing in Cording’s life—whether reading a book or hearing birds or cutting brush—that doesn’t remind him of his son’s death.

Which makes the final of these “New Poems” especially powerful. The poem is titled “Looking Around,” and it begins:

Where are you?—
the question your mother cried out
the night you died. Five years later
and what we say is: you’ve gone
inside us. Of course, where else.
We’ve taken you in,…

So Daniel has moved “inside us.” There’s even a play on “we’ve taken you in”—as we might “take in” someone who needs a home.

And now that you’ve come
to be in us, we like to believe it’s your way
of looking around.

The poem then describes some of what they envision Daniel seeing as he looks around:

The sky, a milky blue,
is blooming with clouds…
                               The Muscovy
duck that sat inside a giant staghorn fern

for weeks now waddles down to the water
with her eleven ducklings; they are
in the water the way I believe you are in us.

The poem ends with why all this matters:

All of this—
the ducks, the ducklings, the cloud countries,

the sky and water—give the moment a fullness
I can’t explain,…
                                as if they want
to give us an even better look, and look we do,
so much just a few feet away
that we could not have imagined without you.

After the initial three lines (“Where are you?— / the question your mother cried out / the night you died”), there is no more “dead” or “death” or “died” in this poem. Five years have gone by since Daniel died. Cording and his wife have come, now, to a kind of closure: they don’t need to ask, “Where are you?”—because they know now where he is: “inside us.” And from within them, he shows them how to “look around.”

At last they can “look around” without seeing signs of Daniel’s death everywhere: in (as in previous poems) the barred owl, the larches, the ladybugs, the purple martins, and more. Their grief hasn’t gone; how could it ever? But within it—as Daniel is within them—they can experience “a fullness” that connects them to their surroundings in a peace-filled way.

Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.

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