November's Arrival

by Sandra Kohler
 

Rain on the windshield is melting the leaves, limbs
of the large old trees at the edge of the parking lot –
oak, maple, a pine. Leaves – dragon's blood brown –
seem to be moving into the gray dark, flood, deluge
that ends on the black macadam. This descent –
of rain, of leaves, of dark – will not stop. Endless,
it comes, it goes, it flows, it stays. This is how
November arrives. It is the flood of rain, it is
the coming of early dark. When you were born,
brother, this is what the world was: dark, cold,
getting darker, colder by day. You brought your
mother, our mother, this fell season, this fall of
dark. I imagine her waking nights to your cries,
rocking you in her cold arms, her feet on cold
linoleum, her whole body appalled at the season
she found herself living. For the first trimester
of your life, of her life as a mother, each day
less light. She saw only winter ahead, saw that
she would never recover the life she'd imagined
on the sunny beach where she stands smiling
in the one photograph I have of her before she
married, sealing her future. Your birth meant
the death of that future. She never forgave you.


* * * * *

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 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.