Rendered into Paradise

Jean Feraca

Like a devoted archaeologist, Feraca sifts the multi-layered strata of spirit and flesh, insistent on uncovering the ancient secrets of their intermingling. She perceives them not so much as competitors but as co-workers: the spirit makes flesh sing; the flesh gives spirit form. Each offers revelations, if you learn to read the clues. So, when her mother dies, Feraca searches urgently through that embodied life for signals pointing to its substance. Her quest is a meditation of elaborate metaphors. A fisherman and a prize trout engage in a long “game of nip and tuck, hook and lip” and finally “play each other out.” A river of ice and sapphires, very like her mother’s cool, blue eyes, swells to a treacherous, vital current in which Feraca is finally invited to swim. “Our two densities met and merged/emptying into one another…/and we flowed that way together/until I felt everything she had ever withheld/flood into me,/faith, fortune, forgiveness,/as I swam through the blue electric river of my mother.” Feraca squeezes issues great and small for their essence. The gift of a tomato becomes a golden, redemptive feast. A monastic retreat and a lover’s visit juxtapose dimensions of wine and sacrament. “Jesus and Bacchus, what am I doing?…/Does it matter which vat…/we dip from/if it’s rapture/we’re after, why not be drunk by noon?” Feraca, discovers, to her surprise, that happiness is “humming overhead, invisible.” “Are you capable of happiness?…/She checked the box marked Yes.” “But you have to really want it./You have to choose, and then, be willing/to be rendered into paradise like lard./O Lord, I am willing.”

Jean Feraca is an award-winning poet, essayist and public radio broadcaster. A world traveler, Jean grew up in New York, earned a Master’s Degree in English language and literature from the University of Michigan, did doctoral work at the University of Kentucky, and worked as a free-lance reporter for National Public Radio before joining Wisconsin Public Radio in 1983. Jean is host and co-producer of Wisconsin Public Radio’s nationally recognized news and cultural affairs call-in program, Conversations with Jean Feraca. Her writings have been anthologized in The Dream Book, which won the American Book Award in 1986. Winner of a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship and a NEA grant, as well as The Nation’s1975 Discovery Award, Jean has published two books of poetry, South from Rome: II Mezzogiorno, and Crossing the Great Divide. Jean currently resides in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband.

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Excerpt

August I

Cicadas chew the eye of noon.
Joe-pye
high as I am.
Orioles in soundless pairs over the goldenrod
rise.

The air, stabbed like a saint with sorrow and desire
shrills.
This is the sound love makes.
Love’s apple
lets go the bough,
drops
to earth with a thump, round and rosy-cheeked.
My mother’s dead three weeks.