Sandra Kohler
Push
In the bland reaches of cold sunlight March is becoming itself: blue ice, the cutting painful edge of growth. I dream I'm riding the bike I'm afraid to mount, on a dirty lane, a track partly covered in snow. I reach a hotel where I meet a woman I knew as a girl. We haven't decided whether to stay the night or drive back home, go out for dinner or eat sandwiches in our room; we stand in the doorway, under a canopy, and watch the rain begin. The woman I am in dream is decades younger than I am waking. Inside all the old women and men who meet on the steps of churches, in the aisles of supermarkets, who mill around outside the concert hall or senior center, are worlds in which they are the young still, not the uncomfortable scarecrows they have become. I am gray, lined, sixty. My hands are seamed, inscribed. What they say is everyone's story. The sky is scored by white diagonals plunging to the horizon, its floats of baroque cloud, fleshy, faintly pink; a world made of line, shape, light. The sky's my discipline, my medium for articulation. Life is not as closed as our narrowing eyes make it. This morning I could decide to learn Chinese, to become a Sufi, study mechanics. Three birds arc through the yard, end by landing on the telephone wires along the alley. Small arrivals, subtle celebrations, like the snowdrops spreading white petals in the garden, like the shoots – deep grassy green, pale, yellowish, jade, rose-edged, fat, blade-like, wispy – everywhere, pushing up.
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.
