1913issue6online

128 ink and paper. For the time being, I am not a medium. Our being, at this time, is likely transcending worlds, a window between them, a window that means, but what? Perhaps our ghosts will one day meet, whether we are alive or not, and be able to explain the window to us. Perhaps we will fall in love. I am beginning to think that Ryan and Catherine have a lot in common with poems, in more than one pair of ways opposed to one another. The fun of the poem is solving the riddle, which now seems the poem’s occasion, which it is not. But I know that abstraction is frightening, fun, wild. In the dark marshes of abstraction, between the inky reeds and salivating clouds, ghosts and poems are waiting to be found. I watched Ryan drown in the mud there, but I will not. And just now, as I write these next few lines, my cat is scratching at my window, an actual window, a window that means, at least as much as the finches pecking at the yard beyond it, probably more. My cat acts like he wants to be beyond it, but he becomes so afraid when I take him outside. In this respect, I am glad to be who I am. A cat, but not a cat. A window, but not a window. A ghost, but not a ghost. To love without fear. I feel most loved when I feel like a window a ghost is looking through. -James Knippen

1913issue6online

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