Poems
by Sandra Kohler
Sonnet for Strangers
When the brother of a new friend dies suddenly, I listen to her story of what their connection was, wasn’t, hit oddly hard by this tale of near strangers. Reverberations of my one brother’s death, echoes of how distant I feel from my living brother, sister. If they die before I do, what will I feel? Anger and pity. Those words come. I let them. At whom, for what? Anger and pity: are they always twins? My anger at, pity for my sister, my two brothers, living and dead, are reluctantly related, siblings bound and determined not to be bound to each other, grieving, wanting to be free of the bond of grief, haunting the waste sad time before and after: after anger’s disillusion, before pity’s knowledge. Amazed The day is a maze, tunnels and turnings. Old and without wisdom, I let what I know be undone by where I am. The roof leaks, the window frames are rotten. I write emails, not the letter I owe, put off till tomorrow what yesterday couldn't phone in. We can’t decide whether to worry about the roof or the window or what’s at the door. Thinking makes nothing happen. Nothing happens without thinking. What I needed was the present; what took me away from it were obligations assumed accidentally, unthinkingly, turned chains. Mind-forged manacles, or the body-forged: sex, death, the past, the future. I am learning so much and understanding so little. I am learning so little, understanding so much. |
Sandra Kohler has published three collections poems: Improbable Music (WordPress, 2001), The Ceremonies of Longing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), and The Country of Women (Calyx Books, 1995). The Ceremonies of Longing was the winner of the 2002 AWP Award Series in Poetry. Her poems have appeared over the past thirty-five years in journals including APR, the Gettysburg Review, Slant, Prairie Schooner, the New Republic, Tar River Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, the Missouri Review, and the Colorado Review.