robert cording Poems

If you were alive, you'd have called
on the phone from Florida, asking
if it snowed, and how much. And, yes,
April arrived with its usual Fools' joke,
and I woke this northern morning to snow,
five inches or so, that seamlessly made
everything new, even the French doors
in the kitchen a trellis of blooming light.
My backyard gave me the new Jerusalem
in a vision as real as snow could make it.
That was hours ago, and now,
the low ceiling of clouds raised, the higher
spring sun bearing down, the snow
is already porous, riddled with holes,
water gurgling in miniature rivers or pooling,
and the roof's drip-line tap-tap-taps
a code on the hedges below. At my desk,
I'm doing my best to decipher it, but all
I've come up with is something you said
about the changeableness of the weather:
life requires constant adjustments of hope.
So now that my new Jerusalem's become
some last confection of winter,
I will report that what's here and now
is a small flock of dirt-loving juncos poking
for seeds where grass has been uncovered
by the coming-into-its own April sun.
...

Blessed are these vultures, robed in black,
blood on their beaks, on their clawed toes,
who attend most single-mindedly
to what we most want to forget—this death
at highway's edge, a belly-opened,
fly-ridden fawn around which they shuffle
deliberately, wings jutting disjointedly.

The vultures say everything is flesh, nothing more.
Blessed is the kingdom where all things end
to clear the way once more for beginnings.
For theirs is the kingdom of transfiguration,
of the forever stilled taken into their ungainly bodies
and lifted up, their outstretched wings translating
the afternoon's warm, rising thermals in elegant circles.
...

Always the same. Always new.
That throated trill, the throb of it

heard through shut windows
and doors, their inch-long bodies

inching in more and more March
light, the trees still in-waiting.

That first stirring, then frenzy—
peepers, coming alive with water

that slakes the dry thirst
of winter above and below ground

and a newborn sun's command
to begin again, begin again.

That wonder at what is going on.
And when I open the door,

the still cold air thrilling to this
riot of need, my entire body

turns inside out, and yields
to these spring passions of earth.
...

Year after year after year
I have come to love slowly

how old houses hold themselves—

before November's drizzled rain
or the refreshing light of June—

as if they have all come to agree
that, in time, the days are no longer
a matter of suffering or rejoicing.

I have come to love
how they take on the color of rain or sun
as they go on keeping their vigil

without need of a sign, awaiting nothing

more than the birds that sing from the eaves,
the seizing cold that sounds the rafters.
...