April 4 Poetry: Robert Cording, Erasure

Right after my Dad died I picked up a magazine and found a poem called Ears of the Heart. I knew it so well I could nearly recite it. It was about our last moments of death and what it is that we hear...

The author of the poem, poet Robert Cording, I later found out that Sean had as a professor in college! We bonded over that and when we started to date ended up having breakfast with Bob and his wife. I never told him how powerful his poem was to me at a difficult time in my life; I did tell him that the waffles were amazing.

So I am not going to share Ears of the Heart. Rather here is another Robert Cording poem from Image Magazine, Number 53, Spring 2007 (Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, WA)

Erasure


It's what I need to practice,
The lines of my life too neatly drawn
Around the comfort of being here.

It's why I'm out here again,
in the middle of the field just as
the day pauses between what is

and what was, darkness rising up
between the hemlocks and spruces
that have brought their shadows

together. I'm waiting for the moment
when the oaks and ashes
slip out of the names we gave them,

the thrushes have had their say
and the dark adds the slightest chill
to the air, a breeze announcing itself

in the wind chimes. It's then
that the invisible hearse of darkness
waits for me to get in. It's then

that I too often call out, here
I am, to someone who has just begun
to wonder where I have gone.