Please activate JavaScript!
Please install Adobe Flash Player, click here for download

1913issue6online

127 Ghosts Love Windows Ghosts have been happening more and more in poems lately—a phenomenon probably having something to do with the recession, but actually ghosts have been around for ever, at least as long as poems, which have been around at least forever. Ghosts, however, are problematic in that they are, like love, pure abstraction. As in, I love my mother the way that ghosts are made of sound—and love the cloud that resembles a mushroom growing upside-down the way the hand of my grandfather’s ghost caresses the purring cat at the foot of my bed. If my bed had a hand, it might caress the cat itself, in which case there would be little need for my dead grandfather to stand at my bed’s foot while I sleep. Or, if the sky had a mouth, I might have to settle for an actual mushroom. Yet Ryan, wholly afraid of the word “love,” broke up with a girl who used it to describe the way she felt for him. And at Tuesday’s reading, an audience of mostly poets gasped when Catherine (not a real person) told a boy she didn’t love she loved him. Such awe at such abstraction! Yet poems are exchanging love for ghosts without the nerve to admit how much we are loved by them. Ghosts, the new tree. Ghosts, the new window. And windows love trees as much as ghosts love us, as much as windows. Sure I use “window,” but what does “window” really mean? More often than not, an artificial shell placed onto the world beyond a room, made of glass and wood, or glass-like synthetics. Most often, a window is a haunted magnet. As in, ghosts love windows in old black and white photographs, but this is the most basic explanation—ghosts also have words with us through windows, black and white,

Pages