Given More Time
Poems by Robert Cording
Notes for a Recovery | Locomotive
Kayaking on Mother’s Day | Painted Turtle
Notes for a Recovery
In the shade of a live oak, I’m reading
A book about the history of the heart.
Mine stopped a week ago. If I had died,
And lived in ancient Egypt,
All my organs would have been removed
During mummification save my heart,
Needed to kick start another life somewhere.
I’m happy to be here, attracted by the top
Of a palm tree that reminds me of the cowlick
In my brother’s hair my mother tried to comb flat.
Cowlick. From a cow licking its calf’s hair
Into a spiral.
I helped deliver a calf once
In Ireland. Our neighbor woke me
In the middle of the night for help. He tied a rope
Around the calf’s feet and pulled while I held open
The leathery vulva. The cow lowed in pain.
Then the calf, out and upright, licked by its mother.
And that inevitable moment when the farmer
Had to take the calf from its mother,
Whose long unbearable moan lasted for minutes.
When my middle son died, my body and mouth
Made sounds I had never heard before.
I was writing about him when my heart stopped.
Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, I read, is the name
For broken heart syndrome.
I close the book,
And watch a sky full of puffy clouds back up
Like traffic in another blue Florida sky.
I sit outside to get away from the news,
Where George Floyd dies over and over.
And here I am, given more time.
The late May light pours down. The leaves
In the live oak shiver with light.
Two yellow-rumped warblers moon me,
The bright suns under their tails
Announcing their name all too easily
On this day unchanged by how I might render it,
Or like it to be, life taken away, given back,
Heart-stopping.
Locomotive
. . . can an outsider comprehend that one experiences a story
in oneself from its beginning from the distant point to the
approaching locomotive of steal, coal and steam, and even now
does not abandon it but wants to be chased by it . . .
from Kafka’s diary
Yes, I know that locomotive, that excess of accelerating emotion rushing at me, the fuel not coal and steam, but always the fire (rarely does the story start where we want) my son built the night he died five years ago, the embers left in the metal firepit— the same style he gave my wife and me and we’ve never used. I’ve been chased by memories so exacting, I can feel the grayish half-light of early morning, and how those embers break into fiery red when a breeze blew. I do and I don’t want to go inside again (rarely does the story end where we wish) where my son’s body lay dead on his living room floor, and I do and I don’t want to write about him any more or find words for my grief, and yet the locomotive steams at me and I have no way to tamp down its fire, or outrun its approach. Sometimes I think the only way to love enough is to remain on the rails, to be hit full on by the oncoming locomotive. And sometimes I think the way to love is to let the story remain unfinished, to step aside and wave to those on the train, their faces both particular and fleeting, as they move from one place to the other only a swirl of dust, like a murmuration of starlings twisting and rising, after the train passes out of sight.
Kayaking on Mother’s Day
The worst day of the year, my wife says, waking. An iron-hot day of sun, little or no wind. We head for the water, paddle the mangrove backwaters to the Gulf, empty now save for a few locals. We settle on a beach, sit in chairs we’d tied to the kayaks, and watch the dazzling light turn the Gulf from green to dark blue to Bermuda blue. Three ospreys sit with us, though the squawks they make suggest they are not happy with our being here. We read, swim, eat, and then do the same three things over again. And again. The ospreys have flown off. A ninety-foot yacht crosses the water. We say it must be an oligarch, and look for the Coast Guard to arrive to seize the ill-got property. But all we can see is the ant-like crew moving from one task to another. We wish things were different. There’s nothing we can do about the oligarch. There’s nothing we can do about our dead son. A black-tipped shark swims where we just left the water with an evolutionary elegance. The colors of the Gulf are still changing. A flotilla of cumulus moves above the yacht, the sun sliding now towards the Gulf. Time to paddle home, the tide running in the direction we need to go, a sort of gift to make the day’s end easier.
Painted Turtle
As it happens, a decent day— blue sky, a fresh breeze—goes bad. Mid-cycle, the washing machine simply stops. Of course, there’s a week’s laundry piled up on the floor. But the motor’s kaputt, my German grandfather would say. And now, my wife’s found a leak under the bathroom sink, a gasket also kaputt, between the faucet and the water line. We have the money for a plumber and can afford to replace the old broken washer. But as we look at new machines on-line, I start feeling bad for having options as though we deserve our dripping sink line and no-go washing machine. Still hours till lunch, I think of those who must use the local laundromat, endure leaky pipes, feed their families. I’m looking for something, anything to take my mind in a different direction— I’m like a child expecting some adult to supply an alternative, some sleight-of-hand to get me out from under my maddening preoccupations. And then my wife suggests I go outside, where the day that began well is still there. I stand alongside the pond studying a near vertical, cliff-like rock when a painted turtle climbs up out of the pond. The rock is so steep, it feels like the turtle should slide straight back into the water, but it’s already sunning itself in this comically improbable position. I watch its wet shell lightening as if I’ve become part of that old joke about watching paint dry, and I laugh at myself, the sun declaring the day half done, and not half bad.
Robert Cording’s most recent book is In the Unwalled City (2022). New poems of his can be found in The Common, Southern Review, Hampden-Sydney Review, Image, Hudson Review, and New Ohio Review.
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