Sandra Kohler
For the Body
i. I come to the window, the coffee, the page, by rote: all savor gone. What is is broken and scattered: light behind cloud, cloud cover itself. I've forgotten everything I learned in the school of sorrow: those oily lessons for our watery selves. Nothing changes the body but the body. Mine this morning small sites of pain: split fingertip, pulsing ankle. Something solid offers me a place to stay, asleep but not oblivious, a consciousness that doesn't translate into morning. The creek lies glittering in the light. Frost on the fields, haze over the mountains: silver, satin, another form of light. Seize the day and we do, feel it shrivel in our fingers, condense. I'll cook and eat a revolution today but the recipe is lost, it can't be passed on. ii. Sipping coffee, I am aware of how chilled I am, how the hot liquid slips down and does not warm that cold core it approaches. Without body we could not experience mind. Dreaming, the world around me turned liquid, this familiar place sudden Venice, water all that joins one block of buildings to another. I'm in a canoe with my husband when he's swept into the river. Afraid I'm lost, I manage to stop the boat, brace it so he can come aboard. The rush of water underneath the bark is alive, as if time had taken body. In my life, it has, its terrible current pulls me through shoals, past swiftly fading shores, along the banks where birds I scarcely identify are singing, nesting, crying out the pleasure of living out of time. And I rush by, rush by. iii. Piero paints the Madonna so pregnant she must be in her ninth month, the baby descended, head engaged already in the birth canal, solid weight, pulling her earthwards. Her blue gown bursting like a membrane, rose lined, the color of blooming flesh, her solid ankles slightly swollen, her solid Piero feet. She is rooted, she is a fine plant, she is bursting apart with her swollen seed. In the middle of an olive grove, a field of wheat, an orchard, she is the body's shrine, dusted with red Umbrian earth, sun parched. Take away Botticelli, take Fra Angelico, take Perugino, leave me only Piero with his grammar of the body and I will know it is all there is and emblem of what it is not: planted solidly on earth as if we belonged in this world forever. As we do. iv. Nothing will be like this morning. Embrace it: nothing. Must we leave this world, starve, wean ourselves from the flesh, the immense and terrible comfort of our own bodies, the muddle of desiring still to be? I'm brewed like coffee, baked like bread. Give me one stone for memory, one for comfort, a final round solid concentration of matter in my palm: the moment.
Sandra Kohler's second collection of poems, The Ceremonies of Longing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003) was winner of the 2002 AWP Award Series in Poetry. A first collection, The Country of Women (Calyx Books) appeared in 1995. Her work has appeared in literary magazines including Prairie Schooner, The Colorado Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal over the past thirty years. After living in Pennsylvania for most of her adult life, she has recently moved to Boston, Massachusetts.
