The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Split Daughter of Eve by Catherine Gonick

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Being Treated as Dead

How tribal it feels, like being shunned
by Amish, shown the dirt
road out from a Pilgrim town,
forbidden to place a last offering

of flowers in a palm leaf
basket at the village shrine
in Bali. But even a family
of two sisters is a tribe.

A radioactive horse between us
couldn’t decay fast enough
for us to outlive its halflives.
She disowned me, left me

for dead, like a daughter
of Orthodox Jews who marries
a goy. Did she sit shiva,
cover mirrors? Does she light

yahrzeit candles? I’m wearing
a shroud, so can’t understand
how she can still send cards
for Christmas and my birthday,

containing still more cards entitling
me to free coffee. Is she buying
time? Will I be dead only for
a decade, like an ostracized

Athenian official? If life,
as a Buddhist teacher said,
boils down to three words,
not always so, do I try to detach

from both hope and fear?
I feel like Schrödinger’s cat,
condemned to remain
both dead and alive, or half

of an entangled pair of sub-atomic
particles that can’t unknow each other,
from any distance. After thirty
years of not speaking

to her sister, our dying
mother said, This is silly
I should call her, but didn’t.
Constellations revolve, above

and below the horizon.
Tracked by stars, malign
and kind—before death,
who can say what’s final?

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