five poems
by Elana Wolff
On Listening to Philip Glass, Violin Concerto No. 1
I lie on the floor all afternoon,
playing Gidon Kremer
playing Glass. Broken chords, arpeggiated,
wafty stratospherics
falling—
at my belly, under wing, a churning inner timbre—air
as close to current, blood
& pulsing
in & out
—the soloist & orchestra in ticking oscillation:
strict, propulsive
thrill—
Those drawings by a boy in middle
school who didn’t speak, but drew—obsessively & deftly—
airplanes breaking up mid-air.
His pen & ink would move so quick—we gathered
round in awe to watch
Kazuo Watanabe
do his thing / repeat / repeat /
jumbos cracking up—his one motif.
Flung across the pages—bolts & rivets, like notation.
Fuselages, stabilizers,
slats & flaps & engines; gears—
reams of silent pictures.
He left before the end of term,
we never exchanged a word.
I didn’t think
to ask him for a sheet.
In Winnipeg on the Centenary of Kafka’s Death
The corner lot
I come to, all along it
grassy mounds.
Peek-a-boos from burrow holes—
a head appears,
a staring face,
another and another.
Here and there, alert,
up/down—
a colony of prairie dogs,
the fetishes:
domes and rims and entrances and
scampering and ramming hard
and chewing grass as sharp as perianal
scent and blades.
The detail of the tail.
Not like dogs’ at all, these barks.
More like dolphins
throwing their voices
at crows. Kafka and my prairie-boy father
meet in the eye of my moiling mind
like sibs in transmigration
on this lot.
I watch a rodent show its nose. Hard to say
if it’s out of the ground,
or in it.
Stuff That Stirs
A fuggy light, a balmy day,
Bob, our dog,
still horizontal
in bed.
I step outside, sit back to read a recent
book by Modiano
who writes of disappearance, loss,
oddly-named acquaintances
and long-gone loves
and canines; someone
always being sought, self and others
found, or not; doppelgängers,
fronts & bluffs—
stuff that stirs me up.
Sitting back, re/reading, I ascend into a reverie,
slip inside the blue-black
scrim of ink.
Hey there, says an inner voice,
Where would you put the soul,
sixth sense, this metaphysical static,
which makes it hard to hear
the reedy music. Is it a harmonica?
Are we on a mountain train?
I jolt awake, the book is lying sidewise
on my knee, a dog-eared LOST DOG
notice stuck in the gutter. HE ANSWERS TO SHANGRI-LA—
the notice says, I eye the silly name,
and our dog Bob comes bounding, like a telephonic
foundling,
into my lap.
Behemoth of the Salt Lick
The sun shone dull as a bruise,
the wind soughed
slyly as an alibi—
civet-scented, kit & caboodle.
That’s right.
Quite the animal
girl I was—tender of mice
and gerbils, hamsters, turtles,
fish, a talking bird, a tabby.
But love
took form
in a small, flop-eared albino—
Cavia porcellus.
She squealed, she scratched,
she bit,
I held her,
fed her lettuce, roots
and vittles, changed her pine-chip bed. To me
she was Behemoth of the salt lick.
She understood the work: the fierce
commitment she instilled in me
to care with special fervour
for a peevish
pink-eyed pet.
A milky scrim
spread over her eyes
one day she ceased to eat. I felt completely
stunted as she waned.
Someone, maybe my mother, suggested
we bring her to the vet.
Put down your little pig, he said,
and took her.
The sun shone angrily that day,
white-hot the next
and next. Then xanthous as a bruise
when it turns from purple.
Photo of Elana Wolff
BIO: Elana Wolff writes from the ancestral land of the Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat First Nations in Ontario, Canada. Her poems have recently appeared in The Antigonish Review, Asemana Review, Best Canadian Poetry 2024, The Nelligan Review, Qwerty Best-of Anthology, Pinhole Poetry, Rat’s Ass Review, and Women Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution. Her cross-genre Kafka-quest work, Faithfully Seeking Franz, received the 2024 Canadian Jewish Literary Award in the category of Jewish Thought and Culture. Her poetry collection, Everybody Knows a Ghost, is forthcoming with Guernica Editions.