An Answer Without a Question—Robert Cording

If he were alive, he might have shrugged 
and said, things happen for no reason, 
but he wasn’t, he was only my son 
in a dream, where he found me 
sitting in the woods trying to understand 
his death. There were birds I knew,
but no longer had names for,
and a half-dozen deer browsed nearby
as if I was not there. I was so happy 
to be speaking with my son, 
but, in the middle of what I was saying,
he disappeared.  I kept sitting where I was,
as if he’d return again, but I knew 
nothing else was going to happen.  
When I woke, I had that feeling 
I often have when getting into bed 
of both dread and the possibility of relief. 
I was still partly in the dream, and I felt 
he was like a god, utterly removed, 
and not knowable any longer. 
Shaking, I sat up and tried to focus on 
the larches outside feathering the wind, 
and a sliver of moon that caught and released 
a scrim of fast-moving clouds. I breathed in 
the smell of the grass I’d mowed
that afternoon, then rolled towards my wife
whose skin was cool to my touch. Far off 
in the woods, I heard the sense-startling
yips and bawls of a pack of coyotes. 
All of it came to me in a wave of sensations
nothing like words and yet, oddly, felt 
like a gift, something like an answer.

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Robert Cording is the author of several collections of poetry, including Life-list (1987), Heavy Grace (1996), Walking With Ruskin (2010), Only So Far (2015), and Without My Asking (2019). Cording has received numerous honors for his poetry, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He has served as director of From the Fishouse and was poet-in-residence at the Frost Place. Cording taught for many years at the College of the Holy Cross and was a poetry mentor in the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University.

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