It is a presence and a presencing. — Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water My smartest friends these days are skeptics and who can blame them? Even the stars have been coopted for astrological brands with a price. But what about the real clouds and the ocean ocean? The little bird and the daily ant that knows nothing about good property. Sure, sure, that’d be called awe, you say, with something smart about Freud and the eternal womb, which sounds sensible, but doesn’t get to the warmth of an upturned hand, doesn’t quite capture the sound of your last breath. My mother was an archive of ghost stories. Ghosts on windowsills, ghosts on the highway, ghosts on the peripheries of real houses and real lawns. Ghosts with knock-knock jokes, ghosts with rage and an eye-full of revenge, ghosts like a mirror of our worst clichés :: ghosts who laugh, ghosts who cry, ghosts that simply cannot die. Ghosts with heavy love, filling the room. Ghosts messing with vital documents and hiding the keys. Ghosts taking in the mail, ghosts taking care of empty houses. Ghosts in your wallet, ghosts in your hair. Ghosts as credit, deed, eye. Ghosts as a genuine apology. Ghosts as a defense of recordkeeping, atonement, true justice. That’s the thing :: the idea that there might be something unimaginable, formless, frightening even, in the collecting night. That that is what makes us human in the death machine of bite and might and fear and dues and rights. This silly belief, this barely-there idea that what feels dead might go on living, that what feels impossible in the realistic lockstep of history might be moving. And that our knowledge, in all its ocular glory is flawed and mortal and slight. And that the world holds so much more than data and the norm of fear. And that the world can be unmade in this true justice of a ghost hour, in its human need for surprise :: a fractal world spinning, spinning into the map of nowhere, from where this vision, this ghost, drinks and drinks. And there is joy there, in the fusty rot of our best designs, and an unspeakable capaciousness for living.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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