I’m standing in the exact spot
of this photograph, looking at the past—
my middle son, still alive, lying on the rug
at my feet in my oldest son’s house.
On his wide chest, his niece, weeks old,
sleeps, adrift perhaps in the familiarity
of the heart’s steady beat, her memory
of him formed mostly by this photograph.
It’s late afternoon, the same time as it is now,
a last square of sunlight on the living room floor.
I am trying to retrieve the texture of that day,
the first fetal leaves of mid-April’s hard birth,
the sky pink and blue, lights coming alive
in the houses. I remember all of it, even the way
I projected a too easy future, uncle and niece
kicking a soccer ball back and forth.
Now I am standing in the quiet interval between
what is gone forever and what is here—
my granddaughter, now five, someone
who is already a self neither my son nor I
could have imagined, a self even she
may not remember just as I cannot remember
myself at her age. In this moment
that seems both inside and outside of time,
I feel a strange, beyond-my-understanding
generosity of feeling for that peace of a day
long lost, yet living, if only in the coarse mesh
of memory and words gathered to catch
what was here, then gone, but still part
of time, as even my son is a changing presence
always evolving in time, this day and that one
five years ago both here at once for a time.
Robert Cording has published ten books of poetry, the most recent of which is In the Unwalled City; a collection of new and selected works is due from Slant in 2025/26. His new work is out in The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, The Sun, and Orion.
