Most ghost stories ask what a ghost would do to us. Dave Bonta's poem asks what a ghost would be like, and the answer is stranger and sadder than a rattling chain. The title works as the first half of a sentence ("If there were such things as ghosts"), and every line after it finishes the thought with the same blunt phrase: "They would." The hypothetical opening gives the poem room to play, but the tone is deadpan, as if a naturalist were describing a species he happens to know very well.
The first image is a joke: ghosts "white & watery / as boiled potatoes." The line break matters here. The word "watery" lets us expect something eerie, and "boiled potatoes" lands in the next line like a dropped plate. A ghost is traditionally a figure of dread, and here it is bland, soft and domestic. The next line pulls the other way: "They would shimmer like the moon in a ditch." The moon is beautiful and the ditch is humble, so the ghost becomes a piece of beauty that has ended up somewhere lowly. Together the two similes make the ghost both ridiculous and faintly luminous, and the poem keeps balancing these two feelings.
Then comes the oddest detail: "They would have no eyebrows." Eyebrows are what let a face show doubt, surprise or sympathy. A creature without them is unfinished and unreadable, a blank that cannot say what it feels. It is also very funny, which keeps us off guard for what follows.
The poem turns toward satire when these ghosts "frequent banks & stock exchanges / instead of cemeteries." The usual haunted places are old and quiet, but Bonta moves the haunting to places of money and speed. Judging by the imagery, the suggestion is that the truly hollow, bloodless, watery beings are already among us, and a ghost would feel at home where people trade in things that aren't quite there. The ghosts start to look like a portrait of modern life.
The strongest image comes next: "They would step into traffic / like swimmers into a cold mountain lake." Cars cannot hurt a ghost, so the step is not really dangerous, yet the simile gives it the hesitation of someone about to feel a shock. It is the one comparison in the poem with real physical sensation, the bite of cold water on skin. The ghost seems to want what it can no longer have, to be startled by the world and feel something. The image is quietly tragic, and it echoes the "moon in a ditch" by setting something delicate against a harsh, ordinary place.
Speech is stripped away as well. These ghosts "would be able to murmur / only a single word: Ah." There is no "Boo" and no moaning prophecy. "Ah" is the sound of a sigh, of recognition or relief or pain, and it is mostly breath. The capital letter and the colon give it a small ceremony. It can mean almost anything, which makes it perfect for a being that cannot explain itself.
The final line, "They would be afraid of the dark," completes the reversal. Ghosts are supposed to belong to the dark and to frighten us with it. Here the ghost is the frightened one, as helpless as a child. By the end the poem has turned the haunter into the haunted, and the speaker's cool, catalogue-like voice has turned into pity.
The form supports all this. There is no rhyme, and the lines are short, plain and mostly end-stopped, so each statement lands like a fact. The ampersands give the poem a casual, notebook feel, as though the thoughts were jotted down rather than polished. The stanzas vary between single lines and couplets, which makes the poem move in small beats. The repeated "They would" works like a spell of deadpan certainty, and the "Ah" near the end is the only moment the ghosts get a voice.
The poem matters because it uses humor to reach tenderness. It takes a worn-out figure and makes it fresh by asking what is left of a person with no body, no face and no words. The answer feels uncomfortably close to home: pale, expressionless, drifting through the places where we work, and afraid of the dark.