Five Poems by Elana Wolff

 

Entering the Painter’s Space

 

Feel the atmospherics. See

a level section and believe it

to be real. Count on contradiction,

unexpectedness,

a link:

St. Elmo’s rain, anticipation

soon of seeing sun.

 

Sky will not be sky alone

and trees not only trees.

 

Lead me to the clearing

at the nexus where you dwell.

There, a window frames a Sitka

spruce, her drapey raiment,

a flimsy, wishing-nest

of mourning doves—interpreter-angels.

 

Overhead, the whitish sky

we’ve all seen holding heaven,

touching down in lines

as pat as math—

piercing pink to coral-violet

sea to seaweed green.

 

The certainty of death

is met by life, perpetual deftness.

 

The things we see are anything,

not nothing,

never nothing. Nothing is a stand-in

language bending

like a lemniscate—O, there you go again,

and over and over

 

 

 Shape Taking 

 

So tired I could cry

and something flits, is 

stuck to dust. Or is it dusk

 

already taking

shape of what’s contained …

I touch its face

and mind’s electric eye—a blur,

 

a blow-by.

I’ve stopped consuming myself

with (f)acts. The saucepan

 

boiling over and the hissing

hullabaloo;

I’m not an irreproachable wife.

 

“Did you do some email-cooking today?”

    you nod to the smoking pot.

“Our own burnt (g)host,” I testify,

 

aggrieved.

Bombs went off this afternoon  

at C.—

 

    Slain and maimed are whisked away,

    the site restored and normalized,

    per protocol, in minutes.

 

So tired I could cry, my eyelids

flit, the vision sticks: I’m sitting,

wringing hands to keep my palms

 

from burning,

front from sloughing off. Amygdala

is over-lit, detecting some un-

 

verifiable smell.

   “Did you land too far away

   to sniff me?” 

 

 

A Cappella

 

We heard this morning blue jays

holding a shriek-fest in the neighbour’s maple,

 

long enough to signify

the truculence of nature,

 

its swift and sure ascent: A cappella

shrieking up to the spheres;

 

we settled back to breakfast. You to your egg

and online news, I to my tea and book.

 

One of a thousand breakfasts we’ve held together

without ado. You said something

 

about the market—bulls and bears,

then lungs.

 

By which I understood you meant

a stage in fetal progress—

 

this is where my thoughts convene these days.

I sip my tea, you eat your egg, the sky beyond us

 

wan—except for two blue

contrails crossing the vault.

 

You woke before me this morning

and knew I wanted my scapulae rubbed—

 

as in the knotty spots I call my hidden-

wing insertions.

 

“Where did you fly in the night this time?”

you asked, massaging the spots.

 

All I could recall were bits of breath. 

 

 

Twenty-Twenty 

 

I woke up at the end of 2020

feeling vermischt: blurry-eyed and muddled, 

 

heavy-legged. Couldn’t get out of bed.

I lay on my back and gazed at the squiggly 

 

fissure in the ceiling—a crack that had

the habit of sometimes looking like a rabbit. 

 

Crack. Habit. Rabbit.

I read this somewhere long ago, I try to remember 

 

where and why and how it relates to me ... a test. 

 

Mice. White. Snow. Icy.

Which word doesn’t fit?                               

 

Horticulture. Metafiction. Hemisphere. Subaltern.

“Sub,” I tell myself out loud, “means 

 

cue to take

my feet down. Off the bed!” 

 

It’s probably always a wish to turn impairment

into clarity somehow, heaviness 

 

to levity, and legs

 to holding us up.  

 

 

Weighing In 

 

It’s not that I sounded

wrong to myself

when I weighed in with my point.

It’s more

that the weight

fell

egg-like

down

my front—

 

a citric

tone of yolk,

a squelch—the sucking

sound of treading

into muck.

 

I’d had the big idea

I needed

to chip in

to the talk,

that staying on the sideline

saying nothing

would make me pointless.  

 

The talk bobbed on, intensified, 

and waffled into Wah-Wah ~

 

then the signal

petered out—too weak

to transfer

anything

but noise.

 

At which point

I likely realized

I have always loved

the bluer, less effulgent

side of green.

Elana Wolff lives and works in Toronto. Her poems and creative nonfiction pieces have most recently appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2021, Canadian Literature, The Dalhousie Review, Eunoia Review, The Maynard, The Pi Review, Sepia Journal, and Vallum. Her collection, SWOON (Guernica Editions), received the 2020 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry.