Frost: it's 32 exactly. The sky
utterly clear: pure wintry sunrise,
deepest blue bowl, along the horizon
faintly green. But the line of hills is
not itself: a mock range of river fog
hides the real one so completely
it might have vanished.
Yesterday a deer breaks through
one of the big windows at the Penn’s
Creek senior center, tore around
the room, out another window, left
behind blood, broken glass, fur.
They look for it—it must be nearby,
dying—they don’t find it.
How fast the fog ridge is moving,
streaming downriver, racing like a
life, strange procession of inchoate
forms. How can the hills—so massive,
solid, impervious—be obliterated
by what is so impermanent,
tenuous, fragile, floating?
A cold light is rising from the alley,
the black gardens, the black green fields.
A cold light is falling from the blue
depths of distance. Light ominous as
that wild creature breaking through
the glass which separates us from the
world, its fragile wildness.
Sandra Kohler's second collection of poems, The Ceremonies of Longing, was winner of the 2002 AWP Award Series in Poetry, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her first book, The Country of Women, was published by Calyx Books in 1995. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The New Republic, The Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Gettysburg Review. She and her husband recently moved from Central Pennsylvania to Boston.
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