Michael Simms: Bob, I loved reading What’s Possible: New and Selected Poems, just released by Slant Books. It’s a true masterwork. One among many pleasures is seeing how consistent in subject and voice the poems are even though they were written over a period of forty years. Most poets go through a long process of finding their subjects and growing into their voices; whereas you were born, you might say, fully formed. How is it that you found a mature voice and sustainable subject early in your career?
Robert Cording: Thanks, Michael. My “early career” was somewhat long. I published my first book, Life-list, in 1987 when was I thirty-eight. I had been writing seriously since my twenties and like so many others, I was a finalist or runner-up in countless contests. I had probably published more than twice the number of poems that comprised Life-list. All that to say, the poems I wrote that mattered most to me were direct, easily understandable on the literal level and, most importantly, accessible to my own family of electricians and plumbers, knitting mill workers, and telephone operators.
I also knew by the end of college what I wanted to write about. [thanks to my mom]. My mother felt I was a gloomy child, too caught up in all that was wrong with the world. She said, make a list of all the good and bad things in life. [Finding] the bad was an easy task given the Viet Nam War, a government that trafficked in lies, the continuing horror of racist policies, and a country that seemingly never wanted to look at its imperfect past or even come to grips with the Civil War we’d all studied in our history classes. But to my utter surprise, amid my ongoing list of horrors, I found myself asking, why did I believe life was good? I’m using “good” as it appears in the book of Genesis—not to mean perfect, but something like fit or harmonious. [In answering this question,] I’d stumbled upon my subject matter. From that moment on, I have been explaining why I think life is good despite [life’s] harms—both the daily harms that are part of the given world (volcanos, hurricanes, and the like), and the atrocities we continually commit against one another.
Here’s a poem from Life-list that introduces my life-long commitment to the ordinary:
Exterior View with Goldfinch
(after seeing Fairfield Porter’s work)
.
In “Still Life With White Boats”,
the foreground and background are all
wrong, the far-away boats almost the same
size as the closer pitcher and its bay
of blue. There’s nothing between
the still life inside and those boats
except the even light and the strong focus
of early fall, a day in late afternoon
when the usual birches, the burnt-orange
meadow, the water all look significantlycloser. It’s said that breakthroughs
are mostly accidental, the obvious seen again
in a new light: Now some scientists see
the plumage of birds as such a rich surface
that its worth must lie simply in the visible
appearance. These goldfinches are lovely.
I wrote about them to a friend, beginning
“Nothing much has happened here . . . .”
Nothing has, but I suspect you’d understand
how such days go on to make a life.From Life-list (1987)
MS: One of the most important aspects of your vision as a poet is your passion for nature. Birds, trees, clouds, and rivers consistently appear in your poems. Your formative years were spent in the Adirondacks and on the tip of Long Island, where your grandfather kept a boat. You’ve mentioned that the days in the woods and on the water taught you the pleasures of what William Wordsworth called “solitude.” And you’ve also said that as a young poet, you heard in Wordsworth the sound of your own voice. Why is Wordsworth’s poetry so important to you?
RC: “Solitude,” of course is the opposite of loneliness. You may be alone in the solitude of the natural world, but there is, around you, the plenitude of sky, trees, water, birds, plants, animals. What’s important about solitude for Wordsworth is linked to attention. Walking through the woods or canoeing a river with someone else is partly a social event—the talk between you as you move together is an important bond. But walking or canoeing solo focuses one’s attention on what’s going on around you—the water’s course through rocks, or what trees are where, and how they bend differently in the wind. Solitude focuses our attention outward, on that world of ten thousand things we pass by too easily. Once as a young writer, I loaded a backpack with various guides to trees, plants, bushes, birds, butterflies, and walked into the woods. Then I sat down and tried to name everything around me. What struck me back then was how such an activity demanded real focus—how many petals does this flower have, how many sepals, anthers, and pistils? Are the leaves arranged in an alternate, opposite, or whorled pattern? I began to think of the natural world as having a multitude of singular identities that I needed to pay attention to because, as Wendel Berry says, attention is “owed” to this given world. Given because it is just here. The conditions we must accept and live with are given because there is no reason for the world to be, but it is.
This poem is kind of an Ars poetica for me:
Morning Prayer With Hopkins’ Kestrel
It is required you do awake your faith,
Paulina says to Leontes, and these crows,
spurting from the night’s silence into the gray before
dawn’s rose, yell it in through my open window.
.
I am slow to cooperate. O Lord, I owe you
at least the modest diligence of looking carefully
each day; so let my narcoleptic steps deliver me outside,
the sky blue-ing this day at the tail end of summer.
.
Here is my morning report. High clouds.
An intermittent breeze, two boxy cedars bowing stiffly,
a frenzied swarm of gnats forming and re-forming
earthbound clouds in the shade of the barn.
.
A slight reddening in the apples. The grass stands
straight up, full of last night’s rain. Two nuthatches
spiral an ash trunk, probing. A squirrel rides the wave
of a branch until it stills. Towhees call out their names,
.
and the flare of a cardinal streaks into a nearby maple,
the red confection of its crown laughably exotic.
A hummingbird levitates, darts forward into the yellow
cave of a daylily, then returns to the light.
.
The sun has concentrated itself in a silver bowl of water
I’ve put out for the dog. Yes, another list, Lord. Call me
literal-minded. But it’s my only way of seeing the next
and the next familiar thing that raises itself out of anonymity.
.
Forgive me this invented ritual. Now, I’m watching
a kestrel con the field from fifty feet above. Minutes ago,
I noted its warm russet back, the stunning slate blue head
marked with black slashes. Lord, I’m more birdwatcher
.
than acolyte, this raptor’s fierce attention waking me
to the rapture of looking, its tail and narrow wings
adjusting the sleek body in the invisible currents
until it comes to a hovering standstill, at rest on air.
.
From Without My Asking (2019)
MS: In your engagement with the landscape, you seem to draw also from the American transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. You have an entire book titled Walking with Ruskin, following in the footsteps of the British romantic writer and critic. You’ve also cited John Keats as a major influence on you. Why are 19th century poets important to you? Do you consider yourself a transcendental or romantic poet?
RC: Yes, all four writers that you mention have been important to me—especially Thoreau and Ruskin, who placed great emphasis on “seeing” the world around them. Thoreau, of course, concentrated on the local, boasting once he could be woken up years after he went to sleep and he would know the day and month by the state of the Concord trees, plants, and bird songs around him. I understood that the feeling of belonging we all want—often desperately—begins with knowing what is directly around one, whether it be woods or neighbors and neighborhoods.
Ruskin answered a different need in me. I began college as a biology major, but I disliked all the memorization the sciences required. I also had trouble accepting the notion that species survival was entirely a matter of mutation and adaptation in terms of what was best for survival. I was always struck, for instance, by the number of songs each bird uncorked and how that sheer number and the exuberance of the song seemed unnecessary, or, perhaps better said, excessive in terms of attracting a mate. I think scientists have come around lately to seeing more in bird songs, bird intelligence, and playfulness than was first imagined. Ruskin thought to see accurately demanded both rigorous objective seeing and love. Love allows a kind of fullness of sight that more easily lives with contradictions. I always felt my initial poor reaction to what I was being taught about evolution had to do with loving the richness of bird songs or the excessiveness of the colors in bird feathers that seemed beyond the requirement of attraction, mating, and survival. Ruskin and Thoreau and Wordsworth all taught me that seeing was also a form of gratefulness. To simply look hard and long at the “ten thousand things” around us is a form of paying respect to the world we have been given.
So, in answer to your question do I consider myself a romantic, my answer would be yes and no. I would say I’m the offspring of Frost, Bishop and Wordsworth—Wordsworth looked for transcendental connections between himself and the world of nature. When the boy in “The Prelude” hoots to the owls, they hoot back. When a powerful buck crosses a river in a Frost poem, his conclusion is: “that was that.” The moose in Bishop’s famous poem is just a moose, but it can evoke a kind of communal wonder.
Walking with Ruskin
Each day I walk for an hour or two,
what started as exercise now a matter
of devotion. Or, less grandly:
walking gives me something to do,
a kind of discipline since I don’t know
how to move towards any of those
big intangible goals—wholeness, God,
forgiveness, justice—but I know how
to walk. Sometimes I bring Ruskin along.
.
Despite his holy striving and cloying
superlatives (“the greatest thing
a human soul does in the world is
to see something,” or “art springs from
the most profound admiration”),
I like the way he forgets himself
in his concern for what is particular
about an eagle’s beak or the green-brown
coppery iridescence of a pheasant’s feather.
.
He’s teaching me a kind of readiness
for what comes along as it pleases:
a line of ants carrying the remains
of a red emerald butterfly, or
a brook in winter moving under ice
like the one-celled life found in a drop
of water under a microscope.
I like to compare notes with him,
to count the shades of blue
.
on a kingfisher’s back or the three
different kinds of wing feathers,
but I’m still learning to look at things
with Ruskin’s respect for fact
and his love for what’s being seen—
this beetle, say, that’s crossed our path,
its two topside eyes ringed in white,
the lacquer of its shell a depth
of black and darkest greens..
Today, the late July pond water looks
like used car oil, and the roadside grass
is a pointillist study of greens
and the bright white coffee cups of
Americans who run on Dunkin’.
Ruskin and I are looking at clouds,
a kind of medicine. Ruskin says,
they calm and purify, if only because
the sky is large and we are not.
.
And if I’m always half-thinking of
my credit card debt, or if I’m seven
to ten years of mortgaged life
away from retirement, I go on
crouching down for a beetle
that doesn’t care if it’s seen, though
my seeing it makes the day more real
to me. Nothing much, but something
I’m always thanking Ruskin for.From Walking with Ruskin (2011)
MS: Is your fascination with living things a spiritual inquiry? You often refer to prayer in your poems, and you taught a course on the Bible and literature. Do you consider yourself a Christian?
RC: I like to say, as Auden said, I am “becoming” a Christian since that state would require an emptying of the self I have not been capable of. The bible is not a set of rules and regulations used to prove who’s right and who’s wrong. For me, it has been the guide to my life, but only in the sense of what I see as the bible’s central message: wake up. In that sense, my writing has been a spiritual inquiry into what it means to wake up: to be fully alive and joyful. Even though, as Wendell Berry says, “you have considered all the facts.” The facts, of course, are the daily atrocities that take place all over the world, the constancy of our acting inhumanly to one another. What we wake up to in the Christian story is this: the ultimate reality is love.
Gratitude
In his prison letters, Bonhoeffer is thankful
for a hairbrush, for a pipe and tobacco,
for cigarettes and Schelling’s Morals Vol. II.
Thankful for stain remover, laxatives,
collar studs, bottled fruit and cooling salts.
For his Bible and hymns praising what is
fearful, which he sings, pacing in circles
for exercise, to his cell walls where he’s hung
a reproduction of Durer’s Apocalypse.
He’s thankful for letters from his parents
and friends that lead him back home,
and for the pain of memory’s arrival,
his orderly room of books and prints too far
from the nightly sobs of a prisoner
in the next cell whom Bonhoeffer does not know
how to comfort, though he believes religion
begins with a neighbor who is within reach.
He’s thankful for the few hours outside
in the prison yard, and for the half-strangled
laughter between inmates as they sit together
under a chestnut tree. He’s thankful even
for a small ant hill, and for the ants that are
all purpose and clear decision. For the two
lime trees that mumble audibly with the workings
of bees in June and especially for the warm
laying on of sun that tells him he’s a man
created of earth and not of air and thoughts.
He’s thankful for minutes when his reading
and writing fill up the emptiness of time,
and for those moments when he sees himself
as a small figure in a vast, unrolling scroll,
though mostly he looks out over the plains
of ignorance inside himself. And for that,
too, he’s thankful: for the self who asks,
Who am I?–the man who steps cheerfully
from this cell and speaks easily to his jailers,
or the man who is restless and trembling
with anger and despair as cities burn and Jews
are herded into railroad cars–can
without an answer, say finally, I am thine,
to a God who lives each day,
as Bonhoeffer must, in the knowledge
of what has been done, is still being done,
his gift a refusal to leave his suffering, for which,
even as the rope is placed around his neck
and pulled tight, Bonhoeffer is utterly grateful.
From Against Consolation (2001)
MS: I’m so sorry about the passing of your son Daniel in 2017. In your New and Selected Poems, the experience of grief is central. Can you tell us about your sense of elegiac writing? Are there particular poets who have inspired you with their elegies?
RC: I believe that the only way through grief is to embrace it. Even at the time of his death, we centered our son Daniel’s funeral around a passage by Dietrich Bonhoeffer that begins, “nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to attempt to do so. We must simply hold out and see it through.” Bonhoeffer helped me recognize that as long as the emptiness remains unfilled (which of course is painful), that very painful absence helps keep alive the person we love. Elegies have changed over the centuries. There is of course less consolation in the traditional places—religion, cycles of nature, Wordsworth’s “philosophical mind.” For me, the modern elegy begins with Ben Jonson’s poem about the death of his first son. Jonson wants to argue that our children are only “lent” to us by God, and states that perhaps it is better to die young (his child was seven) than suffer the harms, including old age, that would surely come to him. He says, the real problem is this: “O, could I lose all father now.” Of course, no father can. And no consolation can suffice.
Elegy for a Dream
I am lost.
I could be anywhere
in the northeast—
glacial stones, glacial ledge,
gray birches leaning in one direction
or another, a line
of mature oaks and maples
running along a long
abandoned stone wall.
A moon, quartered,
sheds little light.
I am calling in the dark
and my dead son answers.
I can’t see him,
but the voice is undeniably his,
even if it doesn’t carry far.
When I ask him
if he knows where I am,
he answers that he cannot help me.
When I ask him where he is,
he says again he cannot help me.
When I call out to him
to ask him what I should do,
only a dog barks, then another
farther off. When I wake,
dry and hoarse, and get up for water,
I am drawn to the window
by the light, the moon full,
the shadows of some larches
stretched across the field
where three deer go on
with their lives undisturbed,
their raised heads and flared nostrils
finding no hint of me, still lost
in a dream that is now also lost.From What’s Possible (2026)
MS: You write about your father having given up his dreams because too much damage comes with them. What damages, if any, have you experienced by following your dreams?
RC: My father’s holding back was different than mine. For him, the known status quo was always safer than going for broke—he had tried the dream route early in life. He wanted to be on the radio, wrote radio plays, and moved, with his new wife, from the north to the south for a job. They went broke, had me, and moved back north where my father, who had no mechanical skills whatsoever, worked for his father-in-law who had a plumbing business. My grandfather had to fire him. After that my father took a job he hated for the next 25 years as an insurance underwriter, commuting over two hours a day from northern New Jersey to New York city. At day’s end he went back to work delivering medicine for the local pharmacy. He saw his life in a singular way: to provide for his family, no matter how awful his day-to-day job might be. My first book, Life-list, traced my “original sin,” that I didn’t know how to live in the world as it was. Rather, I wanted to live in a world that I wished would be. Then I lost a very close friend to a freak motorcycle accident—he was run over by a garbage truck while stopped at a red light. The loss was beyond what I could bear. I swore then (ignorantly of course) that I would never let myself feel this much; never love without holding something back. What followed was a numbness that ruined my first marriage; that sought for control over things that were impossible to control. It wasn’t until my grandmother, who was like a second mother to me, died some years later that I was broken open once again, and knew that I needed to live in that open-hearted state no matter the pain.
My second book, Heavy Grace, traces this evolution.
Washing the Body
At the end of your life, you are all weight,
nothing in your body to help lift it at all.
There is only the empty diagram your lines
of bones and skin make, worn for eighty-one years,
but never again. Hard to believe this body
charged so through the world—this still,
it seems never to have moved at all, never
to have risen this very morning. A long day
of pulling yourself upright, letting yourself
lie down. Then it was done. No matter how
slowly death comes, it arrives all at once.
Now I run a damp cloth across your forehead,
feel a crease left by a last frown. I remove
your valuables as the nursing home instructed:
a watch that hasn’t stopped, a wedding ring
inscribed with promises. I don’t know what to do
with your hands. Should I fold them over you,
or lay them, open, at your sides? Lifting one
to my face, I have to hold it in place, cupped
to my ear like a shell. In your eyes,
the radius of light I knew you by glints
like a mirror in an emptied room. There is
nothing to see, yet I may never again see
it so clearly. Nothing to wish for, nothing
to will, now there is only this washing to do.From Heavy Grace (1996)
MS: In your poem “Talking Through a Storm,” you write about “what it means to be / a poet in an age that doesn’t believe/ … in much.” What does it mean to be a poet in America today? What is the role of the poet in this age?
RC: I can only talk about what it means to me to be a poet who believes that we live in a world that need not be, but is. While I don’t believe language is transparent, I also don’t believe that our attempts to say what is unsayable are vanity projects that are ultimately delusional. I trust language to name—not definitively—those shadowy borders between what we can know and we cannot know. I think an important role of poetry is to bring us to what I’ll call primal moments. Carl Jung said about humankind that we “woke up in a world [we] did not understand and this is why [we try] to interpret it.” He believed that the unconscious, that place where the dreams and myths of primitive man are still with us, was being ignored and distanced by the modern scientific and technical world. More importantly, he felt that we could not be whole without access to those ancient expressions—moments when we are either confronted by the indifferent forces of reality or feel as if we’ve returned to paradise, to the very site of the creation of the world. I would agree. I don’t mean to imply that we should look to the arts as our means of salvation. I mean only that they can help us see the world freshly again. In Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Latest Freed Man,” such a moment comes when the man can “be” again without a “description of to be” when he experiences the “freshness of the oak-leaves.” I think the experience that Stevens refers to here is transcendent, but not in the sense of lifting the person into some otherworldly place. Rather the experience, like Job’s, is one that restores us to ourselves. We see once again what is always there but which we have lost sight of. There’s a similar moment in Gilead when the narrator remembers a moment when he saw a line of oak trees: “I stood there . . . and I thought, It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.” Each one of us intimately knows this very experience or one just like it: the startling greenness of grass after a long winter; the lush red of a cardinal in the snow; the strange rightness of day and night rather than clock time one experiences on a camping trip; or the endless discovery of something new in the face and body of a loved one. I believe that novels and poems, paintings and music, allow us to be more vivid, if only for moments. As the Polish poet and Nobel Laureate, Czeslaw Milosz writes, “When a thing is truly seen, seen intensely, it remains with us forever and astonishes us, even though it would appear there is nothing astonishing about it.” For Milosz, to contemplate “tree or rock or a man” may bring us “to comprehend that it is, even though it might not have been.”
A Christmas Story
Sure, I’d had too much wine and not enough
of the Advent hope that candles are lit for;
and I’ll confess up front, I was without charity
for our guest who, glassed in behind those black,
small, rectangular frames, reminded me
of those poems that coldly arrange a puzzle
of non-sequiturs to prove again how language
is defective and life leads to nothing more
than dead-ends. So, after a night of wondering
if our never-more-than-hardly-surprised guest,
a young professor whose field of expertise
seemed to be ironic distance, would give
a moment’s thought, as he took apart everyone’s
unexamined stances, to how and why his own
might be constructed, I blurted out a story
over our Christmas dinner dessert, about
Alexander Wat, how the Polish poet,
taken one day from his Soviet prison
to see a local magistrate, stood in the sun,
reveling in its warmth on his face and arms
and hands; as he took in the beauty
of a woman in a light green dress, he knew
he would soon be back in his prison cell.
He never forgot, he said, the irony of
his freedom, and yet he felt, standing there,
something like a revelation, the autumn day
surging in those silly puffiest white clouds,
and a hardly bearable blue sky, and the bell
of a bicycle ringing, and some people
laughing in a nearby café, and that woman,
her bare languid shoulders turning in the sun—
it was all thrilling, achingly alive, a feast
happening right there on the street between
the prison and a government office, nothing else
mattering, not even the moment he knew
was coming, and arrived, right on schedule,
when he stood woodenly before the magistrate.
And when I had finished, my face flushed,
my guest looked at me with astonishment,
unable to process where so much emotion
had come from, and then asked, calmly as ever,
what I meant when I’d used the word, revelation.
.
From Only So Far (2015)
MS: In “The Book,” which is the second poem of your New and Selected, you say that the Book of Unknowing is an important touchstone for you. On first reading the poem, I thought you were referring to the Christian mystical text, The Cloud of Unknowing, but on subsequent readings, I’ve wondered whether you are actually speaking of another text, perhaps a hypothetical one. So…what is the Book of Unknowing? Is the Book a metaphor for the totality of your mystical beliefs? Does it refer perhaps to a necessary emptiness we must experience in order to be filled?
RC: The Book of Unknowing is my made-up guide. I wanted my invented book to remind readers of the 14th Century Christian mystical text, The Cloud of Unknowing, but my made-up text is for me to consult in my grief. It warns against all the mistakes I made have made when grieving. And most of all, it brings me back to love, the painful reality of love that accepts what you call the “necessary emptiness” that the Bonhoeffer passage I quoted earlier is all about.
The Book
Since my son’s death, I’ve read each day
from the Book of Unknowing.
What I know, it says, is like spring snow,
melting as it falls. But I am not like the snow,
it reminds me, which vanishes and doesn’t care.
The Book says the red trucks like my son’s
that I sometimes follow for miles
will always keep vanishing. It says
the moon waxes and wanes, the sun appears
and disappears. The Book tells me: Be careful,
wisdom and self-pity can look the same.
It says remembrance is never hagiography.
That grief is the thumbprint of my soul,
and whatever I know, I know by its absence now.
It says I am asleep in the silence of the dead.
The Book asks if I am aware
that wherever I go I bring grief with me.
If I can learn how to love by learning how to die.
Every day. Love is necessary, the Book demands,
even when it is a splinter of glass
lodged in the heart. What I cannot see is
what lies ahead. What lies ahead is always
waiting for my arrival. On the first page
of the Book, it tells me I know nothing.
On the last page, I know nothing.
On the thousands of pages in between,
there are lists of everything I thought I knew.
I read and read, slowly returning
to who I was before I thought I knew who I was.
Love what cannot last, the Book of Unknowing
instructs and each day say a chorus of hosannas
for all that was my life and still is.
From What’s Possible (2026)
MS: You’ve previously said, “I have always felt the unearthly earthliness of the world.” Can you explain that statement, in light of your very concrete imagery of nature?
RC: Yes, it is abstract! When I was nineteen, I had a kind of epiphany that may just have been the result of sleeplessness and endless prayer during the days between Maundy Thursday and Easter morning. On Easter Morning, there were three very ordinary sounds and smells: the branches of a sweet gum tree scratching against my window in the wind; a woman whose high heels clicked against the street, who was pushing a baby carriage that had springs which creaked; and the smell of my father making coffee, eggs, and bacon downstairs. Each sound and smell felt as if it was being inscribed inside me, and each carried an unexplainable power. Each was astonishing in its ordinariness. Each was just itself. But each had the power that Stevens referred to when he wrote the “freshness of oak leaves.” The earthliness of those oak leaves also carry the power to awaken us to something that need not be, but is.
Mozart’s Starling
A little fool lies here
Whom I hold dear—
.
— Mozart, lines of a poem for his pet starling
.
None of his friends understood.
A poem for a bird?—
and a funeral, and the ridiculous
request that they dress in formal attire.
.
But when Mozart whistled a yet-to-be
fragment of a piano concerto
in the marketplace, the bird
may have sung it back to him—
.
the starling appears in his diary
of expenses, May 27, 1784,
along with a transcription of its song.
What fun they must have had,
.
he whistling a melody, the bird,
a virtuoso mimic, echoing it back,
interspersed among its clicks
and slurs and high-pitched squeals.
.
Music to Mozart’s ears,
that dear bird who sang incessantly
for the duration of its three
short years in Mozart’s company.
.
His little fool was wise indeed—
it could hear a squeaking door,
a teapot letting off its steam,
a woman crying or rain pinging
.
in metal buckets and gurgling
in gutters, even a horse’s snort
or Mozart scratching notes,
and sing it back until Mozart, too,
.
could hear the cockeyed,
nonstop music in the incidental
bits and pieces of the world going by,
the exuberant excess of it all.
.
From Walking with Ruskin (2011)
MS: As you grieve for your son, the joy and beauty of the world consoles you, as it has so many others. In your opinion, how does the power of nature help us heal?
RC: By simply being itself: purposeless, thoroughly itself, just waiting without ever waiting. I would use that old word “abiding” to be seen in that “astonishing” way Milosz wrote about in the passage I quoted above. Nature can’t heal us, but it has the inherent power to absorb our pain in its otherness. Life brings us back to life.
For Acedia
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.
It walked right into the rushing water that threaded
the eye of the canyon and then, without pausing,
walked along the bottom of the river, that brown bird
putting on a Joseph coat, its feathers wearing
a thin silvery film of air bubbles, the water an amber,
pale-green shade of tree-filtered light.
Funneled between the canyon walls, the sun
fell like a shaft of apocalyptic dazzle
as the stout, short-tailed, short-winged dipper—
its body so perfectly made for what it was doing—
walked quietly inside the water, as if the tumble
of currents pressing against it had no power,
or as if the bird had found a pond of quiet thought
at the river bottom. And how casually the dipper
popped back to the surface, bobbing and dipping
in the shallower water, until it climbed out
onto a rock, and began to sing—a clear, liquid song
that had a watery airiness I can still hear
and that helps me think of my son,who must have been four or five at the time,
and sat along the riverbank dipping his bare feet
in the cold, faithful moving rush of water.
From What’s Possible (2026)
MS: In discussing the work of Stanley Kunitz, you’ve said that like him, you work to shape a language that will take into account a world we did not make, being faithful to that essential mystery. At the same time, your work must try to faithfully record the terrifying and painful contradictions of human experience. Finally, it must do so while remaining open to the intrinsic joy of being. You have said your need is to praise. Is this the poet’s role? Why must we praise? How does the poet remain faithful to mystery?
RC: W.H. Auden said about poetry: “there is only one thing /that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being /and for happening.” Auden’s recognition is that we live in a world that need not be, but is, and is ongoing in its creation. Poetry must praise, then, because we live in a world we did not create, did not earn, and might be better off without us. The mystery is: the world is good and we are not. But, could be if we could wake to what is around us at every moment.
Backyard Kingdom
All the way to heaven is heaven,
St. Catherine of Sienna supposedly said,
and on most days, replete with
the stabbed, shot, run-over or into,
the stroked, heart-seized, and cancer-stricken,
I’d say bullshit and be done with it.
.
But today, at the tail-end of April, the sun warming
things up, I’m in shorts and a t-shirt, airing
my body out in a backyard chaise,
ready to emerge at last from winter’s
long gestation in flannel and sweaters.
I’m listening to the nearby maple scratch an itch
against the clapboards,
and a downy woodpecker’s got my foot tapping;
I’m letting things go, deep breathing
with a phoebe’s wheezy fee-be.
.
Game on now, chickadees
have changed their tune—
it’s all hey sweetie, hey sweetie
in the shine and sheen of new leaves.
A cardinal cranks up its engine, a catbird mews
and whistles, and a mourning dove responds
to the earth’s tilt with soft, insistent coos.
When I shut my eyes, the wind DJ’s a mix
of all these singular voices, and the delirium
of their song won’t take no for an answer.
.
Take joy whenever you can get it,
a wise old poet wrote and how can I refuse
this day that seems shaped for my delight,
this luck-of-the-draw moment in the sun,
the air rippling with a green iridescence.
So I say I do, I do to the day’s proposal
and let myself float on April’s soft warm air,
even my sweat-stained t-shirt like raiment,
for now my listening body an ear that hears
the kingdom always here.
.
From Without My Asking (2019)
MS: In your poem “Prayer While Driving Home After My Yearly Physical,” you speak of your diminishment in size and, perhaps, self-importance, as you’ve grown older. And yet, based on the arc of this New and Selected, it seems to me that your spirit has grown larger over the last forty years. What lessons have you learned in your life, and how are those lessons manifested in your recent poems?
RC: It is kind and gracious of you to say that, Michael. I hope you are right. I often pray this prayer of Thomas Merton. Here are the pertinent lines in answer to your question:
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
.
Prayer While Driving Home After My Yearly PhysicalSixty-six, my shoulders rounded, my arches flattening, I am,
Lord, a small man, now a full inch shorter,
I’m told, than I once was. And so I pray
that my end-of-life diminishment might prove the occasion
for some late opening of my cramped borders,
this no-exit, small country of the self.Lord, what I wouldn’t give for a lifting up,
to be free of this strange human gift of making
something less out of something,each day stunting the fresh opportunity—
as your better servant William Blake saw—to become
the towering giant, the four-fold angelic poweryou wanted us to be, if only we didn’t make ourselves
tiny with our incessant self-interest, our hearts
clamped around our enemies,our narrow sympathies and unrelenting prideful gloom.
Lord, at every moment I have been a beginner,
lost in the bewildering wilderness of my ignorance.Now that I am smaller, I pray that it will be
easier to recede from the center of my picture
and find this unexpected reprieve from vanity.Let everything around me grow taller Lord
and more vivid, newly made, like these autumn maples
coloring the air, or this roadside red-tailed hawk,its wingspan blinding as it crosses my windshield,
the road for a moment dark, then bright,
bearing me on, a small man nearing his exit.
.
From Without My Asking (2019)
