I like being a mammal, the only animal who
weeps, sadness a foreplay between sodium
and water. I admire my drooping belly for
waxing and waning like a moon, stretching
over my growing son and then gathering
back together like theater curtains. My ring
finger is happy to wear a different weight
these days. Although my marriage splintered
like my parents’ did, I believe vows can make
some people open like a peony, a hundred
vulnerable layers lying against one another.

I want to rejoice that I’m finally learning how
to French braid my own hair, but it is strange
to be an animal who can remember bubblegum
sunsets, clotheslines pinned with drying flowers,
winter’s generosity of stars. All that beauty
staining my pupils makes me weep, which
makes me remember someone studied
the fractals of tears under a microscope,
so much stunning geometry spilling from me
at each onion and stubbed toe and heartbreak.
My tears’ chemistry–a marvel, a miracle even.

I used to want my heart to be an ocean, not
this river-heart eddying in the slightest pain,
but a gorgeous boss of an organ that could
contain everything, even secrets. In another life,
I might have married someone with a fishpond
heart like my father, so reliable in its seasons.
In this life I married my mother’s Mariana’s Trench
heart with its pressure, its deforming gravity.

I went nearly a decade without crying, but once
I understood my heart would always need me
to swaddle it in music and promise to be kind,
it let me weep again, whole wet pillowcases
full of grief. I bought a lachrymatory to catch
all my splendid tears and save them, because
I like that I am a messy animal full of melancholy
with working knees and a toes that crack when
I walk downstairs, weak hands and a softening
chin that makes me see my mother in the mirror,
crying her famous tears, this time saying
she loves what I’ve done with my hair.

           ^{“death cannot harm me
            more than you have harmed me,
            my beloved life.”
                        —Louise Glück} 

I tell my daughter first, because her knowing  
forces it to become true. I have to leave dad.  

Nothing is going to change. She nods  
like a priest in a booth, the last fifteen years

staring down at us. Explains, softly, 
how she’s spoken of me to her therapist.

Her worry of becoming my mirror. Tells me, 
I remember you, mom, before him. You were happy.

Oh. Oh. To surrender to your death by someone else’s
hand is still a kind of suicide. Slower. I stand naked

on the porch as she recounts in perfect detail,
(in a poet’s detail) the very things I’d hoped

to disguise. My careful little spectator. Diligent neighbor 
to my unnamed agonies. It is not ungrateful to resist

the tyrannies of obsession. It is no selfish act 
to want, suddenly, to stay alive. My dear girl.

She is teaching and I am learning. I not only  
want to be seen, I want to be seen through.

I return to my house, haunted and waiting. 
I look into the mirror and notice the door.