The Story of a Halloween Poem “The Reassurance of Ghosts”
In late October 1982, I flew from LAX to a brand new North Carolina airport called PTI. I was a 24-year old former surfer turned poet, visiting the MFA Writing program at U.N.C. Greensboro. I had never been to the South or even the East Coast and I’d never seen my leaves turn or fall to the ground.
My hosts in Greensboro, Jim and Sue Keith, had three daughters; the youngest two were twins. Jim, my former urban sociology professor in college, was probably in his mid-forties by this time. Jim and Sue had relocated from San Francisco to take jobs at Guilford College, the Quaker school. Jim invited me to join them trick or treating in a suburban Greensboro neighborhood, equally foreign and exotic to me.
The poem that resulted is a dramatic monologue; it’s Jim’s story as I imagined him telling it as I walked beside him and the three girls in the dusk that evening. At one house, I had the spark of the poem, the insight that taking your daughters trick or treating was a metaphor for giving them away at a wedding.
I wanted to age and empty my narrator using his observations of the streetscape of curb cut and treeline: “where the graying leaves have gathered” and “the specter of bare branches loom.” Even the moon is a menace, rising “too quickly and too huge.” I also wanted to balance the solemnity with whimsy: the nascent ghost hums beneath her bedsheet costume, she wields her candybag as a weapon to ward off “goblins, and dogs.”
In the end I wanted to redeem my narrator with a simple gesture from the ghost, bringing him back down to earth (note how “too huge” sets up the internal rhyme of “refuge” in the final stanza). If I am honest, this poem goes way beyond my friend Jim. I am expressing compassion and love for my own father, a parent who I am certain needed more reassurance than I did.
The poem that you read is exactly how it came out of my head after we returned home. I have changed only a word or two in 36 years. I was probably composing it as we approached our final houses for candy. I’m guessing my heart rate was up.
The poem succeeds on many, many levels. It is a fine poem, but it is also a flash fiction short story, or the scene from a play. I also think it would make a sweet little short film, with the poem in voiceover.
I included it a month later in my portfolio of work for UNCG to consider as proof of my writing talent. The poem was published in the journal International Poetry Review about a decade later. I’ve had many people tell me that is their favorite poem of mine. One Greensboro friend, also a father, had it rendered in calligraphy and framed, and it is hanging in his study.
The poem is eerily prescient. Within seven years of that inspiring and ghostly evening, I was the father of a daughter, and since then have given away both my daughters at their weddings. I became Jim.
In 2016, I decided to make “Ghosts” the title poem in my first poetry collection (Fugitive Poets Press). It is permanently in place as the flagship for the 140 poems that follow in the book. Winston-Salem letterpress artist Alan Henderson gave it a bold new look as a giveaway to friends who attended my first reading from my first book as you can see in the image accompanying this post.
The poem title for me is a kind of lifelong mantra and prescience I had as a 24-year-old: ghosts, phantoms, apparitions, specters, the dead, our ancient ancestors and even four-year olds in bed sheets, are comforting in ways we do not realize. Out of gossamer, out nothing, out of the Nether Worlds, they redeem us.
