It Can’t Be Turned to What It’s Not

What poor soul points out,
What you’d have to claim
Was real, a felt thing
In the world of things,
Is not the point here.

The point here’s the word,
The strange, small word, soul,
Which floats through a few
Tongues but has no root.
Lost word, no one knows

Where soul first came from,
What it meant not Geist
Or ghost. What was soul
To the first of you
To use it to point

To a thought not seen
(Or seen? Will o’wisp?)
That meant part of you
The true soul of you?
It lives on its own

With such a ghost crowd
Of like terms from close
And far kin. It’s not
A term, it turns out,
That fits a neat turn.

Ghosts Vouch for One of Their Own

Skull’s bones, the soul is just
Cat like a soft owl, cat
With paws like moths. It is

Not the skull’s gap, the cat
You thought. Soul is, for us,
A friend, just one of us,

A small word come from who
Knows where, who knows when. Some
Said it came from the lake

Or the sea, where it stopped
In the tongues that shaped it.
A cat then that can fish

Was the soul, that slipped through
The waves, no more than waves,
Our friend, strange term, the soul.