Three Poems

Robert Cording

Skunk Cabbage

All along the mud-rutted road
in the carnival time before Lent,
before the trees are born-again
in washes of Easter pastels,

it burns through the ice-bound
marsh, almost mammalian,
making its own heat, its spathe
of purple-veined leaves

a reckless swelling thrust up
from the thickening root below,
its damp, corporeal stench
calling to the soon-to-be

pandemonium of frogs,
to the rapture of bodies enlarged
by the abundance of what is
once again rising inside them.

Larch

Lying there, I asked myself
almost every hour, why
was my life worth living?
when I began to see something
else besides the walls
and the fluorescent lit hallway
of doors. At first, the drape
of a blanket over a chair
that suddenly seemed just right.
Then a glass of water
that projected a prism of light
on the wall. Even the doors,
differently ajar, created
different geometric shadows
on the floor tiles.
When some pigeons took off
together from a rooftop
outside my window, my body
seemed sensitive to the shiver
of light in their wings.

He has told us this before.
Paralyzed from the neck down,
he's disciplining himself
to hope. Looking out
his window, I try to focus
on the slow tai chi of a larch
in the wind. His wife
gives herself to the finite
logic of the next thing
that needs doing.
He needs our conviction
in that hospital moment's
grace which suspends
an airy bridge between
what he saw and the blind
terror of not knowing
whether such moments
will ever be enough.
I point out the larch,
the beautifully expressive
but meaningless gestures
of its topmost branches.

The Mona Lisa as Self-Portrait

X-rayed, the Mona Lisa
turns out to be Leonardo,
his face lurking beneath the face
that's eluded our knowing.

But what if this X-ray, seeing
everything, sees nothing,
finding a man who wanted
only to leave himself behind,

each brushstroke a struggle
to escape the dim, reductive eye,
to turn to her, her lips parted
as if she is about to whisper

what will remain part of her
still, withholding privacy.

Visit Robert Cording as Image Artist of the Month for January '03

Issue #29 • Winter 2000