I Liked Myself Better as an Exquisite Skeleton

In those days, I was working on a theory
that a hole of love could be filled with whiskey.

For one whole holiday season,
I was the leading researcher in my field.

In theory, the hole would get so flooded
that I’d be buoyed to the top, half-drowned,

just able to poke my head above the surface
& frog-kick to shore, surprise!, perfectly safe—

whereupon the man that I loved (the one
I was always trying to domesticate

through elaborate feats of personal humiliation)
would cradle my face in his hands, enraptured, relieved—

but in practice, I drank so much that I ruined Bitchmas
& woke up in the ER wearing only my tights.

After the hospital, I left first
so that everyone could talk about me.

It was my only charity.
And also: the only charity I could afford.

I think I was waiting for someone to tell me
whether this would be a comeback story.

On the long drive home, I stopped to visit
my grandma in the dementia ward,

knuckling off the last smudges of eye makeup
and presenting myself with a gruesome flourish

like a glob of hair pulled from the drain.
When she asked me what was wrong

I thought to say, “I don’t really know
who I am anymore”—but how selfish would that be?

& anyway what could she possibly say to that—Same?
Instead, I held her hand & listened to her

tell me the plot of The Sound of Music.
It was the history of her life, and she had been Maria.

“That’s when I knew I had to give up the convent,”
she explained. “And you know what?

I never regretted it. I loved God, but I also loved
my husband. He was a good man.”

“He really was,” I told her. “It sounds like
you lived a great life. But what about the Nazis?”

“What Nazis?” she said. I loved that for her.
On the day when oblivion comes,

I don’t know whose second act I will embrace
as my own, but at my core, I’m sure

I have never been Maria von Trapp.
At the center of me there is probably nothing.

A me who is trying to cradle my own face
in my hands, telling myself it’s okay.

I worry I liked myself better
as an exquisite skeleton.

Love-starved. Touching the punched part
of the mirror. Filling a bathtub with ice.

When you’re only made of bones
you can be thoroughly fucked up

without ever being accused of human
weakness. Sometimes a hole is just a hole

& you don’t need to dive to the bottom
to find out if Death is still down there. It is.

◆

Black Lake

From love I grew a forest
of alder & maple linden & oak

& I thought I could hide
there harmless

as a cast of clear water
that clings to a leaf

but I watched it all burn
& it burned me with it

I let grief pull down
every willow & sycamore

with a wall of black flame
that could disappear the world