DPF / Jeffers

Thank you to our 21st-Century guide, Lucas Seastrom, for bringing the skull to light and for capturing the imagination of our children with, not only the secret doors and passages, but with the poetry of the carved word, the painted word, the quoted word, the spoken word (by Jeffers himself) and the printed word read aloud, offered back again, as it once was daily, to this plot’s salt air. 

from Tor House / by Robinson Jeffers

My ghost you needn’t look for; it is probably
Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not dancing on wind
With the mad wings and the day moon.

DPF / Merrill

from The Book of Ephraim / by James Merrill

Yet even the most fragmentary message —
Twice as entertaining, twice as wise
As either of its mediums — enthralled them.

DPF / Forche

from Sequestered Writing / by Carolyn Forché

What ghost comes to the bedside whispering You?
— With its no one without its I

DPF / Wright

Fathers and sons.

from Youth / by James Wright

I know his ghost will drift home
To the Ohio River, and sit down, alone,
Whittling a root.