Ghost Story

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 I.
A boy in the back seat, curled over a book
of ghosts when the car arrived in town, looked out
at a row of sagging homes with peeling paint,
a sepia church with graves. His mom saw shades
of the war, the young men who didn't return. The corner
house, she said, was haunted by a hermit
who locked up his Model T and then himself.
The only blacktop street, shaped like an L,
bent past some gravel lanes, and, at the house,
it ended. The aunt, the uncle, the barn and hogpen--
he saw them once and never would again.

  II.
I think I'd like to be a ghost,
to pass through walls and fly,
materialize
at school where guys
couldn't hurt me if they'd try.
I'd disappear;
they'd gasp in fear.
But I wouldn't like to die.

I think I'm not afraid of ghosts
at the village cemetery.
That life goes on
for those who've gone
is comforting, not scary.
But what if there
's just empty air,
with the bones and dust they bury?

  III.
The homes today are straight and white; the church
in early autumn early evening sun
so bright, it hurts. A gravel lot was vacant
where the Model T had been. He parked
and walked to the family farm, no longer a farm,
no longer the family's. No one living now
in that pristine house works in the dirt, although
the house's shadow reached a wall of crops
that starts where the blacktop stops. He remembered the L.
He thought, walking back to the lot where the two lines met,
that's the shape of a man and his shadow facing sunset.

  IV.
I climbed back in my car and adjusted the mirror
and there met two eyes, someone crouched behind me,
a boy about ten who was somehow familiar,
his hair as unruly as mine used to be.

"Young man, how'd you get here? I left the car locked."
He shrugged. I slipped in. It was easy to do.
I was there in your shadow the whole time you walked.
Now, if you don't mind, I've some questions for you.

Are you famous? I said viewers come to my site.
What's that? I thought: country boy, behind the times.
"It's a TV where thousands have read what I write."
Like? Poetry. Cool, just so long as it rhymes.

Was this kid judging me? Are you married? "No." Good.
How old are you? "Sixty." You don't look it. Pause.
Is Grammy alive? His voice was subdued.
I shook my head. That's when I knew who he was.

I wonder, are you still believing in ghosts?
"'Souls,' I would call them." So what is the difference?
"Soul is the tug of the things you love most,
that shapes the way you are through all life's experience."

And ghosts? "--are just metaphors for memory in stories."
He'd looked a bit wistful; his countenance cleared.
You think? I'll show you what a metaphor is!
With a smile and a snap, the boy disappeared.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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My return to a small town 50 years after my first visit seemed like a natural subject for a poem, but nothing came of it. Same with a poem I brainstormed for Halloween. Progress began when I thought I might connect the two.

I hope it's not pretentious to mention the influence of T. S. Eliot. On the 100th anniversary of The Waste Land, I've been reminded how Eliot wrote stanzas from different points of view, in totally different styles. I felt liberated to play again with verse forms I'd loved when I was 10 -- namely, "The Walrus and the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll and "The Cremation of Sam McGee" by Robert W. Service.- WSS