Tonawanda Street Scene #6, Mourning
Will you live for days, dear friend, or weeks ¬–
you whose doctors had given you at most six
months something like a year ago? Today,
hearing that you’d fallen four times in less
than an hour after you’d been moved into
a new facility, ostensibly compassionate,
for the incurably ill, I began to wish for your
death, to imagine a death more conscious,
more accepting, than the one into which
you seem to be blundering. I want you able
to say goodbye to those you love, fully
yourself, rational, though tender at heart;
not confused, struggling, fighting your fate.
I have no power to make any of this real.
I grieve for you while you are still alive,
struggling. The best in you is your enemy:
that will to live, fight on, betraying you
now. All I can do is mourn for it, for you.
*
Realization
Dreaming, I am trying to imagine how to console
my two grandchildren, Kit almost thirteen, Sam
just turned eleven, for my death, for my husband’s,
their beloved grandfather. We are alive but so old
that surely they will have to endure our loss; what
can I do or say to teach them how to suffer that?
Thirteen, eleven. In the dream I realize that when
my mother died I was nine. For most of my life I’ve
believed that I did not mourn her, that my sister’s
narrative of how she had lost a mother, but I had
not, because she would mother me, was the true
story. True story indeed –a fake tale, a makeshift,
shift that for all its lack of substance blinded me:
I believed I never mourned, suffered. Dreaming,
I am reliving that time, recognizing my own agon,
passion, loss. For years, I conspired with my enemy,
robbing my child self of the reality of her pain.
In dream I am given back what was taken from me:
I know what I suffered. Is there some kind of
forgiveness in this dream? Not of my sister, but
of my child self, whom I had judged for decades.
If so, it is not forgiveness, it is healing at last.
*
Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems, Improbable Music (WordTech) appeared in May, 2011. Earlier collections are The Country of Women (Calyx, 1995) and The Ceremonies of Longing, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in journals, including The Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, Illuminations, Tar River Poetry and many others over the past 45 years. In 2018, a poem of hers was chosen to be part of Jenny Holzer’s permanent installation at the new Comcast Technology Center in Philadelphia.
