Robert Cording: Dome Houses
When erected, the domes must have looked
like something built to colonize Mars.
Sean Sexton: Herculaneum (audio and painting email to Robert Cording)
I’m reading Basho’s “Backroads to the North Country,” on my trip, an old, crumbling Penguin classics series that includes four separate journeys and a great intro. He conveys at one point how grateful he is to be on the road, Mt Fuji far away back home in Edo, so he needn’t ponder it in his life for awhile.
Robert Cording: New Morning
Always that moment
when I wake up
in the dark
before dawn
and the first birds
Robert Cording: An Unasked for Inauguration Prayer, 2025
Lord of the light that reveals
how we have failed and failed again
the one requirement asked of us—
to love one another.
Robert Cording: Broken
Now, my brother’s fifty-year marriage
broken off as if their past was
an imposter that had been discovered.
And my best friend’s wife can’t find
the name for husband,
though he sits next to her.
Robert Cording: Power Lines
Their shaggy crowns and bright blue
And white plumage jolt the dull background
Of road-dusty greens. Sometimes I pull over
To watch their unhesitating headfirst dive
Robert Cording: Reading Poems with David
Over the phone, David begins to read
and Mary, in old age, in a nursing home,
returns to life in David’s voice, voicing
her words, her questioning
of her own bafflement
Robert Cording | Notes: August, 2020, Whidbey Island
Some days all of America—the whole messy idea of it—
seems to be right here, the military meeting
the idyllic so casually.
