So what is a ghost line? A ghost line is the last line of a poem you need to make it whole. It’s that exasperating blank space, that missing rung at the bottom of the page in the descending ladder of words. (Or possibly any missing line that the poem needs to be complete.) But no phrase seems right. Sure, you could try making the poem longer or shorter. You could rethink the whole thing, raid it for parts, the best lines, words, images, and metaphors. You can try being patient, setting the poem aside buried pages back in your legal pad, or let it lie, shut silently in your notebook. But it haunts you all the same, even in your sleep. So finally, maybe there is nothing left to do but wait on it, work on something else, put your trust in time and imagination—or leave it to forgetfulness.
The concept of the ghost line came to me after I wrote a poem titled, Schemata. I liked the idea of the poem very much, but couldn’t decide, did the ending work or not? Yeats once said, “…a poem comes right with a click like a closing box.” Some might think this sounds as if it describes poems written in rhyme or fixed form, but every poem, whether in a fixed or open form, has its own unique ending, and who knows how many ways there are to close a poem? Maybe not quite as many as there are poems, but closings should have some sort of completeness and appropriateness about them, as I think Yeats meant, so that the poem functions like a unified work of art and does not seem inconclusive or simply run out of steam.
I once heard the poet, William Stafford, use the term “trajectory,” meaning the organizing strategy a poem employs as it moves from line to line toward a conclusion; for instance, is the poem a narrative, a grocery list or etc.? I have found it to be a very useful term. The trajectory of my poem, Schemata, had already provided me with a somewhat narrowed range of possibilities for the last line, but also hinted at what it might be, as did the imagery, rhythms, the patterns of line lengths and syllables, as well as the recurring assonance and alliteration. So I could sense a kind of apparition, a ghost image of the line I needed. I considered all the above factors, but most of all just what phrase would make the trajectory of the poem seem most complete. The original ending to Schemata seemed almost, but not quite right, and I was uneasy about it; what exactly was I after? Absolutely nothing worked. So finally, in exasperation, I left it alone, hoping that it was finished and my doubts would fade with time.
And so, it was published just as it was in my book, Leaf Notes: Poems of the Plague Years. Leaf Notes (which came out in April, 2022) and, later that June, I was going over the poems, preparing for a book launch reading– and I had just finished reciting Schemata again to myself—when the exact closing line I had been looking for suddenly said itself to me.
This was the ghost line that had been haunting me. I now have a note in my reading copy of Leaf Notes folded between pages 12 and 13 with the ghost line on it and am compelled to tell this story every time I read the now-finished poem. Below is the entire poem with the ghost line (in italics) included.
Schemata
Why the consistent schemata of shapes,
the pinnate leaf of the sumac, the regular
lobes of the oak, the opposable thumb
of the sassafras? In the layered beds
of long dry rivers, the patterned cuneiform
of ancient ferns, brush strokes in dried mud,
figures splayed on rice paper, papyrus,
the pulp of long ago forests inked, scrolled, codexed,
catalogued in libraries? Can we separate
what we are from the order in the order-
seeking mind, from history? Dear reader,
does every
leaf ever really come down
in exactly
the right
place?
Do you read these words by chance, or fate?
The question in lines 11-16 of the poem is a parody of the Zen proverb, “Every snowflake falls in exactly the right place,” which the last line of the poem also comments on and questions.
The older I get, the more I learn to be patient and to have faith, to trust imagination, intuition, and the creative process. If I did not trust them at all, I would have given up writing poems in agonized frustration a long time ago. There are always those moments when the words come in a musical torrent downstream from some mystical elsewhere, but then there are the gaps, dead silences, the gibberish, the wooden lines, the miserable, boring meaninglessness of entangled words on the page, and the closing that just plain stumps you. What can you do? Read, think, walk, sleep, listen to beautiful music, kiss someone you love– try again. Hope and wait and see– and wonder at what comes to you next. One inspiration leads to another, which leads to another, then another. But the process takes its own good time. This is the life of an artist, or anyone tethered to the imagination who is involved in deep looking and listening. So it isn’t surprising, that the experience I had with Schemata and its ghost line quite naturally triggered another poem, titled The Ghost Line, which I include below.
Again, I struggled with the poem, throwing away almost an entire draft of it which was amusing and worked in a way, but was too facile for an idea of this depth. My wife told me she thought so too and confirmed my fears. So I saved a few fragments and started over. One afternoon about a week after I began reworking the poem, a line I had written in one my notebooks and reread a few days before came suddenly into my head: an idea searching for a mind to conceive of it. I knew it was the right notion if not the precise words, and so I wrestled with it until I at last had the last 3-4 lines. By chance or fate, here is the entire poem below:
The Ghost Line,
that missing last line
in your almost finished poem
is just empty space, the poem
hanging there
like the exposed staircase
in the tilted house you once saw
swept off its foundation by a hurricane,
the last step down suspended
one story above the beach,
while beneath the sea swells
and sighs. But you know that phrase
is out there, an island lost in fog,
you can almost sense its shape
count the syllables
sound out the vowels.
Like an echo
having at last found a wall, maybe
even now, it’s on the way
back from oblivion,
searching for an ear,
a mind–the exact words—
to conceive of it.
Many thanks to patience, imagination, intuition, my wife, and my notebook.
Note: “Schemata” appears on page 12 in Leaf Notes: Poems of the Plague Years, by Michael Fallon, winner of the Water Sedge Poetry Chapbook Award, Writer’s Relief, 2022.
© Michael Fallon
Michael Fallon is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in English at UMBC. Poems have appeared recently in Northeast Narrative, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, The Connecticut River Review, The Loch Raven Review, Illuminations, Southword, and other magazines. He is the author of five collections of poetry: A History of the Color Black (Dolphin-Moon Press, 1991); Since You Have No Body (winner of the Plan B Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, 2011); The Great Before and After (BrickHouse Books, 2011,); Empire of Leaves (Singing Man Press, 2018); and Leaf Notes (WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook, 2022), the 2021 winner of the WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest. Essays have appeared recently in The New England Review, on lit hub-The Best of the Literary Internet, The Concho River Review, Broad Street Literary Review, The Razor, The Northern Virginia Review, and Blood and Thunder, and on Pendustradio.com.
The Loch Raven Review 