Knocking the Next, and At the Heart of the Ghost

© Gun Roze, courtesy of the artist – www.shot-by-gun.com 
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.
Spectral © Elana Wolff

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.