☀ Today's Poem: "Melancholy's Mirror" Robert Cording

In the shadowland of my room
this warm winter late afternoon, I watch a stinkbug
cross my wall. Also: two flies that woke this morning
and now, dazed, bump up against the windows.
I'd like to say I'm getting by and getting on with life,
but the latter is a stretch. A tapeworm of grief
has been eating my insides, eating the spirit
of who my son was, his lively mind, his courage
to accept the darkest contradictions.

I've sat here for hours, my companions these two
thoughts—my son is dead and done with me;
how can I know what my son's life was to him,
and him alone? If I set up a mirror on my desk, I'd see
a cartoon of hurt and lethargy. Just before
the stinkbug arrived, I was staring at Dürer's Melancholia
on my computer screen. All those tools—saw, plane,
hammer, calipers, ruler—like my son's, piled up now
in my garage waiting for me to do something with them.

And yet here I sit, as if I were tied up
like my neighbor's dogs. If I were a dog, I'd howl
all day like them. I embarrass myself.
Why can't I remember what ridiculous luck
it is to be alive? One of those flies just buzzed
in front of my face, as if to say,
"Where have you been hiding yourself?"
I could ask the same question, but now
it's on my nose, daring me to come alive. . . .

I belong today to my own anatomy of melancholy—
its long wait for what never happens.
Its shut down of the future. Its after-
knowledge of death that knows no more
than it did before. Its inability to complete
a life that simply ended. Dürer's figure,
winged but paralyzed, moping, tools spread
before him, but unable to create. These words
that lurk like insects this winter late afternoon.