For Acedia

By ROBERT CORDING

Thomas Aquinas prescribed fervent prayer,
and I do pray, but, 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. And so I turn again
to this: a dipper I watched in Zion’s Virgin River.
It walked right into the rushing water that threaded
the eye of the canyon and then, without pausing,
walked along the bottom of the river, that brown bird
putting on a Joseph coat, its feathers wearing
a thin silvery film of air bubbles, the water an amber,
pale-green shade of tree-filtered light.
Funneled between the canyon walls, the sun
fell like a shaft of apocalyptic dazzle
as the stout, short-tailed, short-winged dipper—
its body so perfectly made for what it was doing—
walked quietly inside the water, as if the tumble
of currents pressing against it had no power,
or as if the bird had found a pond of quiet thought
at the river bottom. And how casually the dipper
popped back to the surface, bobbing and dipping
in the shallower water, until it climbed out
onto a rock, and began to sing—a clear, liquid song
that had a watery airiness I can still hear
and that helps me think of my son,
who must have been four or five at the time,
and sat along the riverbank dipping his bare feet
in the cold, faithful moving rush of water.

Robert Cording taught English and creative writing at College of the Holy Cross for thirty-eight years. He has published ten collections of poems, the latest of which is In the Unwalled City. He has been awarded two NEA fellowships in poetry and two Pushcart Prizes.

[Purchase Issue 25 here.]

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

For Acedia

Related Posts

Cover of All Is The Telling by Rosa Castellano

An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano

ROSA CASTELLANO
I’m holding a blank page all the time for myself. That’s a truth that I choose to believe in: the blank page is a tool for our collective liberation. It can be how we keep going. I love that we can find each other on the page and heal each other, too. So, I invoke that again and again, for myself, because I need it.

Cloudy sunset over field.

Florida Poems

EDWARD SAMBRANO III
I will die in Portland on an overcast day, / The Willamette River mirroring clouds’ / Bleak forecast and strangers not forgetting— / Not this time—designer raincoats in their closets. / They will leave for work barely in time / To catch their railcars. It will happen / On a day like today.