Judith Arcana

Lois, Questions

Suppose we could telephone the dead. – Jane Cooper                                                                                                                                                                 

What's it like out where you are?

Is it anything we make up, alive and imagining?

Is it something I can know, or so much not

what we think I won't know even if you tell me?

Is it forever? Is it like religion says? Do you laugh?

Is there music? Is there eating? Sleeping?

And if you sleep, do you dream?

Do you have work? Are the dead a good audience? Do they get it?

Can you go where you want, or is death organized

by time and geography, like living?

Can you fly? Can you see me? Are you coming back?

Will you come home, to the prairie where you used to be?

Or go somewhere else and live in another language?

Will you be someone else? A wolverine, or a stalk of corn?

You might be tomatoes or apples, or spinach on Steve's farm.

Do you still have cancer when you're dead?

Or does it go away after it kills you? Are you angry?

Or is there peace in death? What is peace? Can you tell me?

The woman sitting next to Death

The woman sitting next to Death says:
That next one can fiddle her fingers raw
singing out old blues to a rock
but I am gone away, you hear?
All behind that misty sky.
 
She says: Dress your rose in black
put it out in thick red rain
(less like you and none like her).
You know women live under mist.
Women ask for skin like the sun.

In the Cards

            … after Motherpeace

He is poised in explanation, his crescentfoot wand

painted clay necklace and dark curls

clearly drawn inside the holy past. Stepping

forward, caught speaking in mid-stride

he lets himself be seen. The great falcon rises

behind his mother's throne; he is open-handed.

You may look, he says. Look.

She owns the sword; her gaping wound is clean

pain is jeweled, mouth screams out

of the flower's heart; blue voice climbs the ladder.

She wants to lift her feather-muscled wings.

She wants eyes sharp as the bird’s

eyes, sharp as a cut. The bird teaches her:

One may fly and not fly away.

Judith Arcana’s newest book is the poetry collection What if your mother; among her prose books is Grace Paley’s Life Stories, A Literary Biography. Recent work’s in 5AM, Bridges, off our backs, The Persimmon Tree, and Umbrella; more’s forthcoming in journals and anthologies. Visit juditharcana.com.