Notes To Readers: The Ghost In The House Poem by Dennis Ryan

Sunday afternoon, February 10,2019 at 12: 13 p.m.; Wednesday morning, May 20,2020; Thursday morning, May 21,2020

"Grass, I thought to keep you, would have stayed;
And you, trees, water gone too."
- William Bronk, from the epigraph to Bronk's poetry volume Silence and Metaphor

By the time you arrive,
the ghost will have departed,
having completed its work.
It found a way in, then finds
a way out in the poem's diction and syntax:
in the arrangement of right words
in the right places.It has served
its purpose.This, or something
akin to this happens.There is
this point of separation though
the ghost may return from time
to time to listen to what the poem
says."Find a place for yourself
in a book—" it might finally say,
become the ghost in the house
of the verse it once wrote.