CNF: Water Skiing
by Jenny Burkholder
I watch your burial from a hard-back chair of grief in front of dim computer screen. It’s February, and we’re deep in the pandemic; my father, along with hundreds of thousands of others, are dead. The chair is broken, so I sit in it every day of to remind myself Stop your bellyaching.
Hundreds of people gather on ZOOM because of cancer not COVID. Only your family stands in the cold at your gravesite, and your Rabbi asks us over and over to mute, but the chatter continues as more and more people log on; you have hundreds of friends who cannot be silenced.
One shouts into the screen, I can’t find the fucking volume. Her name is Susan. I begin to laugh, mostly because I have cried so much, and Susan laughs, too, and scoffs, Look at all the wives, they look so old. Someone, whose name I have forgotten, politely reminds her that we can all hear her.
Her square goes black.
Now, I’m scrolling through pages and pages of papery skin, my own sagging and furrowing around my lips. I wonder how many of these mothers grieve for your mother, who wishes she could have seen gray bristly whiskers growing on your chin.
What can I say? My own cancer has become boring and routine, and you’d be thrilled to know that when I see our shared doctor, we talk about Leo Kottke and sometimes, how much we miss you.
I know you love to laugh, so in your honor, I will adopt the day’s metaphor. Like you, I want to hold the boat’s tow rope tightly, letting it pull me lap upon lap around the lake, until my legs ache, my knuckles whiten, and my biceps quiver. It’s then and only then!—such a precarious balancing act on one ski, maybe two—that I will tap the top of my head and let the rope go.
Currently Montgomery County, Pennsylvania Poet Laureate, Jenny Burkholder’s poems have appeared in North American Review, The Maine Review, and Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing, among others. Her chapbook, Repaired, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016. Read more of her poetry and creative nonfiction at overexpressed.net.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Water Skiing”? This poem is for AL who died of breast cancer at 55 years old. Just months earlier, my father had died of COVID, and AL died on his birthday. This creative nonfiction prose poem is about how being alive is a wonderfully precarious act of balancing grief and joy.
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