The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Smaller Ghosts by Jennifer Moore

---

We never saw the fox,
a stranger moving rapidly, nervous

at the edge of thirty years of night.
Hoping to capture

his blue shadow, we made of exile
a homeland, field after field

of high grass and seedpods.
Here again, the suggestion of a form,

stepping into the mouth
of October undergrowth.

Odd birds call. A swallow returns
to an invisible orchard.

Have you seen it? That sound in the brush?
Everywhere, we saw untouched white.

---

Source texts (for all book poems): Claribel Alegría, “Rain,” Rae Armantrout, “Unbidden,” David Barber, “To the Trespasser,” Emily Berry, “This spirit she,” John Berryman, “Not to Live,” Frank Bidart, “The Ghost,” Linda Bierds, “The Ghost Trio,” Lucie Brock-Broido, “How Can It Be I Am No Longer I,” Emily Dickinson, [“One need not be a chamber”], [“The Zeroes—taught us—Phosphorus”], John Donne, “The Apparition,” Timothy Donnelly, “Globus Hystericus,” Carolyn Forché, “The Ghost of Heaven,” “Sequestered Writing,” Lola Haskins, “Patsy Sees a Ghost,” Mary Hickman, “Visionary Elegies,” Cynthia Huntington, “Ghost,” Mark Irwin, “Ghost,” Christopher Kennedy, “Ghost in the Land of Skeletons,” Dan Lechay, “Ghost Villanelle,” Dana Levin, “Ghosts That Need Reminding,” Vachel Lindsay, “The Spider and the Ghost of a Fly,” Robert Lowell, “The Ghost,” Nathaniel Mackey, “Ghost of a Trance,” Carl Marcum, “Cue Lazarus,” Paul Mariani, “Ghost,” Sarah Messer, “Prayer from a Mouse,” Eric Pankey, “Epitaph,” “Restless Ghost,” Elise Paschen, “Ghost, Fountain,” Carl Phillips, “Ghost Choir,” Edgar Allan Poe, “Lenore,” Lisa Sewell, “Letter from a Haunted Room,” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Wallace Stevens, “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,” Keith Waldrop, “The Ghost of a Hunter,” Afaa Michael Weaver, “The Appaloosa,” Dara Wier, “Blue Oxen.”

---