Relics
I come to the window onto Tonawanda Street
as dusk seems to be gathering. The sun won’t
set for another two hours but daylight’s fading,
the sky grey, muted like distant birdsong, like
the memory of a melody you’re humming which
captures a lost time, an era in your life different
from the present, but lost now, gone, and because
gone, mourned, mournful. Mournful as these
mornings when I wake alone, alone and lonely.
I have memories of a past, but they’re remains,
dried up leaves in autumn, spent blossoms.
Today when I opened the box on the bureau
we shared, in our bedroom, I thought I’d find
relics of you, a pocket protector, pens, a small
compass — devices you’d use to orient yourself,
measure your morning world. I was wrong.
I take the box — lovely wooden box with roses
painted on its top, but with a deep gash, a crack
in its surface — start opening the sheets of paper
in it. They’re in my handwriting, all of them.
I begin to read and realize they are love letters.
Letters I wrote to you on your birthday, on our
anniversary, on random mornings or evenings
when I found myself thinking of the ways in
which I loved you, rehearsing the reasons for
my love. I never knew you had kept them.
They are precious, precious as the desiccated
finger of a saint, as the fringe on the shawl
of a rabbi, handed down to him by his father’s
fathers, from generation unto generation.
I am undone, scarred and wounded, gashed
by grief like the lid of this box. I want to
encase these letters in a golden reliquary,
to preserve them forever. I will mend this
scarred box, wear it like a habit, a sacred
garment. I will weep tears of joy, of sorrow,
those precious relics of our marriage.
*
Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems, Improbable Music, (Word Press) 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 New Republic, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and many others over the past 50 years. In 2018, a poem of hers was chosen to be part of Jenny Holzer’s permanent installation at the Comcast Technology Center in Philadelphia.