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Cats Can

Benjamin Friedlander

March 23, 2011

You’re feeling silly, but someone said that cats can see ghosts.   So you go to the door with a saucer of milk, and just then the ghost wakes up   from a deep sleep and bleeds a little into the sink.   Or not the sink, but a bed, or rather a head now held up by a bed. Or whatever. It doesn’t matter.   Choosing your words carefully makes no difference to a cat or a ghost.   Look at your backyard. Does the grass care what the frost heave thinks? Contour is all,   even when hidden. The loose overburden covering a buried cavity   is delicately balanced. When runoff- storage ponds seep into the folds   of the brain, the additional weight can trigger a collapse   called a sinkhole, where ghosts bleed into the cracks. Cats can see it.

Benjamin FriedlanderBenjamin Friedlander's books of poetry and prose include Citizen Cain (Salt), The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes (Subpress) and Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (Alabama). He is also the editor of Robert Creeley's Selected Poems (California). He teaches at the University of Maine. Photo courtesy of Stephen McLaughlin.


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