Sandra Kohler

Nobody’s Watching

i.

How opaque our lives are to each other.

Two days away from home and the coffee

tastes odd. The clear cold sky seems to

promise a world open to vision, as our

faces do, meeting each other, our voices

when we pick up the phone. How layered

protective distant packed with possibility

that opening is. I stare out at the clear light

on the creek, the cold glaze on the fields,

stretched and stilled by frost, aware of

something cold and solitary in the nature

of our lives. A mind suited to the world,

a world to the mind? Over and over staring

at the hills the sky the river I wonder why

these forms speak so eloquently to us,

of what they can possibly be speaking.

ii.

There is no making things right, no

settling the murky unfinished business

of our lives as family friends lovers enemies.

There are loose ends, fissues in the fabric,

gaps, moments of uncomfortable silence

even in the dialogue of self and soul. How

we muddle through, the best and worst

of us – or perhaps all of us except the best

and worst. I’m tired of this rub this fray,

this string, this sound. The desire to be

understood is a snare, conducive only

to the old maze of ego, the known borders

of a prisonyard we’ve measured with

our bodies, our habits, our days.

iii.

Disorder in the heart: a kind of craving,

restlessness, comes over me. Discomfort

with what’s done, undone. In my dream

I am folding wash, finding only rags, what

had been a long scarf is now a thin, ragged

shred of cloth, worn beyond recognition.

I wake feeling oddly comforted. Why?

Because of my haircut yesterday, because

I spent an hour with Sabrina afterwards?

Something’s changed and I don’t know

what. Ended or begun, closed or open.

An edge reached: change, illness, birth.

Can I tell the difference? Sabrina and I

talk about marriage and mistakes: would

we have made the same mistakes in

different ways if we hadn’t each married

young, or different mistakes with the

same outcomes? Is what one has missed

made up for by what one’s done, had?

For both of us, all we’ve done or not

has left us where we want to be.

iv.

Last night I ask the two young women

I’m with whether they remember when

they stopped waiting for their real lives

to begin. For me it was the evening in

my apartment on Delancey Street, doing

calisthenics, aware of the tall uncurtained

windows giving out on the narrow canyon

of street, street lights, the night sky, when

I knew suddenly that no one was watching.

Not just that none of my neighbors were

spying on me, or passersby glancing up at

my windows. That there was not anyone

anything any consciousness in whose gaze

I was being assessed, judged, credited,

blamed: nobody’s watching. I knew

my life was what it was, became adult

in that moment, liberating, lonely.

v.

The pleasure of being here, in my chair,

home, aching, still trembling a little from

the day away, the night. A bird flies into

the mulberry, gray arrow flickering through

a white field. Do I want another cup of

coffee? Yes. The yes of things. The birds

on the porch all say yes to the feeder;

the semi roaring down and cutting in front

of us massive and dangerous, avalanche,

comet, says yes to its powerful will and

way, a yes that would be our no,

obliteration; the cold fog breathing

its way up from the river over the whole

valley says the yes of aspiration, a dense

spirit, a wilful blind white embrace

of anything in its path.