a friend confided recently; except
you're not dead. Did she mean
going to bed whenever you choose,
having breakfast at 3 pm, following
a constantly changing program of pleasure
involving boat rides down the Nile, wine-
tasting and opera tickets, or hikes
in moonlight? And what is pleasure
in that pasture you're led to after
the people you used to work for put
an acrylic paperweight and a small
bouquet in your hands then wave goodbye,
goodbye, enjoy? But what else is like
heaven that isn't retirement, or that isn't
being dead? Another friend sends videos
of herself bungee-jumping in South America,
just over the lip of a pretty waterfall
pouring hundreds of feet above a basin of rock
fringed with bird calls. You also hear the mock-
screaming of her family in the background,
though you're sure there is some real fear
swirled in with all the exhilaration.
And are there heavens that exist
but don't come with the prerequisite
of passing some kind of final exam
to see whether your good deeds outweigh
the bad or the times you didn't even make
a choice— which means to get to this point
you would certainly need to have died
first of all? Your father liked to say
(before he died) that the middle way
was the best way. But then another time
he'd turn around and be the biggest fan
of seizing the day, sticking your neck out,
taking a risk: no guts no glory, and that sort
of thing. Heaven, then, here or elsewhere,
before or after death, seems to be something you
still have to work for, for the right to enjoy.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for her manuscript Maps for Migrants and Ghosts, forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press in fall 2020. She is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.