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.
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.
New poems by our contributors: TOMMYE BLOUNT, ROBERT CORDING, REBECCA FOUST, and LUISA IGLORIA
Table of Contents:
Tommye Blount
—An Extra Steps into the Robe
Robert Cording
—The Book
Rebecca Foust
—Field
—War and Peace
Luisa A. Igloria
—Enrique Remembers Melaka Before Disappearing from Known History
Sure, every photograph is an elegy
to what was, but this photograph—
which I’ve turned into my screensaver—
of my son, dead nearly three years,
has him suspended in mid-air
He has just jumped from a rocky outcropping
thirty feet above the shimmering water
of Lake George that flashes silver and gold.
The day itself is glittering with light
that has the feeling of being
excessive and there are (I’ve counted)
seven different shades of green
in the hemlocks and cedars and white pines
growing from the rocky soil of the island.
My son is alive in the thrill of his airborne body,
though it is quiet in the photograph,
no cheers and whoops from his friends
who are waiting at the top to jump,
no sounds of the boats idling below, or the waves
sloshing against their bobbing hulls.
I will not see him cleave the surface of the lake
and vanish with hardly a splash
and then break back into the light,
silvery water cascading from his hair and shoulders.
And I will not see him climb back up the rocks,
eager and intent on his next single-second flight.
But almost daily I give thanks
for this moment in which the past is gone
but never dead, this glimpse
of the terrible sorrow to come, but also
of something like an afterlife
in which his body, relaxed, calm, hovers
as if it’s forgotten its heaviness,
the air holding him fast, halfway between
two places at once, the good light of sky
and the ease of bright water that waits.
Robert Cording has published nine books of poems, the latest of which is Without My Asking. He has recently published a book on metaphor, poetry, and the Bible called Finding the World’s Fullness. A book of poems and prose titled In the Unwalled City, which includes the poem in this issue, is forthcoming.
The royal palms bathe in the soft warm air
of February and everywhere I look there is the play
of glittering afternoon light—on store windows
and metal bistro tables, on the well-polished
always white Mercedes and Lexuses, on the sorbet
pinks and oranges and lime greens of faux-Spanish
buildings. The most ordinary things here seem
In your obituary I concluded, “Muriel lives on in…”
and went on to name myself, my two brothers,
and your eleven grandchildren. I may have been thinking
of Pasternak who said something like our life
in others is our immortality, or I may have just been
looking for a way to make your life continue
even as I announced that it was already finished.
At The Common, we’re celebrating the shortest month of the year with new poems by four contributors to our print journal.
One of those words from another time,
I think, as my walk circles back
towards my house, the wind, an accomplice
For this month’s poetry feature, we are publishing a collection of seven new poems by four The Common contributors.
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