Your Absence

Your absence is
presence this morning
when I wake, when
I rise, when I face
the day without you

after fifty years
of being with you
each day, each night
every day, every night
all day, all night.

How can I learn
to live without
your presence, to live
with your absence,
to live again?

*

Tonawanda Winter #2, Missing

Morning’s tropical: wet, warm;
rain’s fallen, temperatures soared.
There are no doves on the crest
of 83. No one’s afoot. Wrong –
there’s one youngish black man
slowly walking up the other side
of the street. And now in front of
85, Dennis’ truck lights go on.
A sudden spray of doves alights

on the balcony of 83, flurries,
flies off. There are sparrows in our
lilac. Straggling walkers appear,
vanish, there’s someone I’ve not seen
before on the porch of a house two
up from 83. One small piece of matter
– ort, crumb – is picked up then spat
out by three sparrows one at a time.
They dislike the taste of this day.

I miss the dead. My brothers, my
friends, They’re gone. I feel their
absence, their presence. Shirley, Steve,
Susan – each so alive for me. A breeze
stirs, gusts. Dennis’ truck is back, he
gets out, goes inside carrying a small
paper bag. Now the street is empty of
everything but wind. The lilac’s empty
of sparrows. My stay here is over.

*

Afternoon Aubade with Cathedral

I lie in bed in the middle
of the afternoon in a strange
hotel in a strange city,

my husband/lover/partner’s
arm lying across my body as it
has for thirty years, weighted

with time, with hours of the
evenings mornings afternoons
we’ve laughed and quarreled,

made love and told each other
some truths about ourselves,
spoken or allowed our souls to

be silent. Today our bodies
are weighted with these hours,
with years of our presence

in a space holy and unbounded
as La Sagra Familia, the space
Gaudi would not finish.

*

Tonawanda Winter #5, Fears

The morning brings a mystery. Does each day’s
dawning? There’s a police car parked in front of
83, just across the street. My husband watches it
pull away – neither of us sees whether the officer
in it gets out, goes up to the house. Around here,
a police car augurs bad news: either its being
delivered, or that something’s happened within
the house for which help has been summoned.

The day’s brilliant, winter fresh. Stillness, sun,
light breezes stirring. I am astir, I’m alive, awake.
I check the time. I need to shower and dress and
leave. Someone walks up the street, a complete
stranger. Young man? boy? in an orange jacket,
phone in hand. Then stillness again. Even the pin
oak leaves aren’t moving – no, wrong, they’re

starting to tremble. The street, the sidewalks
are empty of walkers and cars, the blue sky
of clouds. Once again I have allowed anxiety
to shape what I am able to see of the morning.
How I wish I could empty my heart of these
fears. Could I? How? Will I? When?

*

Time At Last?

The day after what would have been
your eighty-ninth birthday, I am thinking
again about you, sister, brooding once
more about your failures, your cruelty,
bravery, the strange cocktail of attributes
you carried into all your relationships as
daughter, sister, wife, mother, daughter-
in-law, mother-in-law, friend.

What were you like in the years before
our mother’s illness, before her death?
I don’t know, I remember little. What I
do know, do still remember, although with
memories transformed by time’s perspective,
is the fabulous tale you taught me about
those early days, about myself, about
my loss, about my motherlessness.

In your version of my childhood, I was
not motherless. You were motherless,
but I was not, because when she died,
you became mother to me. I believed
your invention for decades, until I was
older than our mother was when she died.
Your lie kept me from seeing that I was
in mourning, yet not allowed to mourn.

Not allowed to mourn, how could I
recover from mourning, heal? How can
I forgive you? If I cannot, how can I
forgive myself? For not having mourned,
for not recognizing that I was in fact
mourning then, despite all our denials,
yours and mine, of that. Is it time at
last to forgive you, forgive myself?

*

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.