Sandra Kohler (Sandy Iger) has three poems in the Fall, 2013 issue of Prairie Schooner, a fine old literary magazine. You can probably find copies at a good bookstore or library, or order a single copy from Prairie Schooner, 123 Andrews Hall, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska 68588-0334.
[Ed. note: You were also able to read one of Sandy’s poems, “On My Seventieth Birthday I Try To Skinny-Dip in Boston Harbor” featured on the web site, Poetry Daily, on Sunday, September 29th, 2013. If you went to http://poems.com/ On that day only it was there to read.]
Meanwhile, she’s received permission from Prairie Schooner to post one of the other two poems, below, on the class website. (A gracious decision, since they don’t usually permit such publication for work in a current issue).
Gray Storm
A gray storm of a day: weather I’d usually
welcome, but this morning, after yesterday’s trip
to say goodbye to a dying woman, its bleakness
echoes, weighs. Overnight, email from a friend
who wonders if he needs a shrink, meds: tells me
during the days he’s full of joy, nights, dread.
This seems natural to me, in touch with reality.
Earlier this week the Times ran a front page piece
about how people all over, except in parts of
Europe and the United States, die in pain,
the excruciating pain of burns, AIDS, cancer
because morphine’s not available. It would take
a Dante to imagine this reality. At my dying
friend’s bed, what we speak of, like the souls
in hell, is former joy: our walks last summer
mornings through neglected gardens, fields,
old graveyards, abandoned campgrounds on
the island where she lived as a child; we talked
about plants, flowers, people; the families
we grew up in, our dead parents, married lives,
raising children: all that made us what we
were. Walking, these shards of our past, bathed
in the glancing sunlight, were lit by flashes of
discovery. Forgotten times, unfulfilled desires,
surfacing, float in the day’s shimmering
air, an island of joy in the dark river of what
was happening to her. That river’s crested:
caught in its flood, she seems not to belong
to this world: shrunken, swollen, her head nearly
a skull, her speech blurred, muffled. She will
not talk away a morning’s walk again, summer
or winter, with anyone. But her wry wit’s intact,
she’s struck by the black comedy of this agon:
the nurse insisting she has to have a shower when,
despite opiates, every movement’s torture. She suffers
most thinking of the pain hers is causing those who
love her: her husband, daughter, son. She’s neither
bitter nor afraid: a resignation which like her faith,
I cannot comprehend. We don’t talk of the future,
only our shared segment of the past. When
it’s time for leave-taking, all we can tell
each other is what we’ll miss: each other.
This poem originally appeared in Prairie Schooner’s Fall 2013 issue.
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