Knocking the Next We rise to shining life, then turn—— lungs to earth, liver to river, kidneys to constellations; heart of the recent being knocking the next. I am for the dark wood, for the slick, invincible mountain. I am for the noble gases, buck- tooth moon and lithium salts, [atropine, adrenaline, cardiac defibrillation] empty meadow fossils and their calm. I lay my head to enter sleep and murmur to a maker ~ unknowable yet knowing. You want a cat to have a tail but some are born without; expect four limbs on a human person, some are only core: I stand within the timber of a that one, essentially trunk. Thankful for my gravity and ballast. At the Heart of the Ghost is death. Constructed from the mysteries and morphologies of life. Persons, their deteriorations, creatures and their echoes. Hosts of probability that death is not oblivion, not emptiness, nor null. That life has such perdurable charge, such synergetic forces it continues unabated in the after- Earth——albeit switched. Every now and then a buzz, or glimpse, a wisp affirms this—— traces adumbrated of a verisimilar inverse. For which one feels at times a pull that’s criminal.
Elana Wolff’s collection, Swoon (Guernica Editions), received the 2020 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry. Her Kafka-quest work, Faithfully Seeking Franz, is forthcoming in 2023. For more on Elana’s work, please see the Guernica website.