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?
 
 
First published in blossombones, Winter 2008