Nothing in "Ghosts" actually appears. No pale figure drifts through the garden and no door creaks. Gary Corseri gives us wind, water, bamboo and a bell, and asks us to listen closely enough that they begin to sound like voices. The poem is one ten-line sentence that works like a held breath. "When the wind shifts…" opens a condition that is not resolved until line five: "then we may hear the chansons of the dead." Everything hangs on that "may." The dead are not guaranteed. They are available only to someone quiet enough to notice.
The scene is a garden of bamboo poles, a pond "carp-jeweled" with fish, fallen cherry petals and a temple bell. Judging by the imagery, it evokes an East Asian setting, though the poem names no place, and the French word *chansons* adds a faint note from somewhere else. Songs appear twice. In line 4 the petals lie "as though a girl had strewn them with her songs," and in line 5 the dead have songs of their own. One image slides into the other, so that youthful beauty and the voices of the dead share the same pond. A falling petal is a tiny death, and the poem lets us feel that without saying it.
The sound of the language does much of the work. "Shifts" and "sifts" differ by a swapped letter, so the wind moves and then strains the water, and the words seem to shift as well. That sifting returns in "sieve" in line 8, and the opening gesture becomes a picture of human life: passion "shuddered in a sieve / upon the spume of time." A sieve lets things through, and spume is foam, here and gone. Passion, the poem implies, cannot be held. Yet the verbs refuse to let it vanish. It "cast spells," and it "cleaved and echoed in a timeless well." "Cleaved" is a double-edged word that can mean to split apart or to cling together, and the poem lets both meanings stand, as if passion divides people and binds them in the same moment. The well is the sieve's opposite, a deep container that keeps what falls into it and gives it back as sound.
Repetition carries the same idea. "Shuddering" in line 6 and "shuddered" in line 8 pass one trembling from the bell to the sieve, from the dead to the living. Vibration seems to be what survives of a person. "Bamboo" appears three times, in the poles, the bell and finally the "bamboo hair," which turns the grove's leaves into a head of hair stirred by invisible hands. Even "clamoring softly" holds a small paradox, since a clamor is loud and yet this one is barely audible. That is a good description of a ghost: full of meaning, hard to hear.
There is no regular rhyme scheme, but the poem is far from loose. Several lines settle into a roughly iambic ten-syllable beat, such as "as though a girl had strewn them with her songs." Line 9, "upon the spume of time, cast spells," is shorter and clipped, as though the spell is cast and gone in an instant. "There" and "hair" rhyme across lines 3 and 7. "Bell" in line 6 returns as "well" in the final line, and the rhyme is itself an echo, spaced four lines apart. A recurring *l* sound in "poles," "bell," "spells" and "well" gives the poem a faint ringing.
The final images are crowded. Passion shudders in a sieve, rides foam, casts spells and echoes in a well, and the metaphors tumble over one another rather than lining up neatly. That may be deliberate, since memory rarely behaves logically either. The poem is worth reading because it turns the idea of ghosts into something you can hear. What is lost and what is kept turn out to be the same thing: passion slips through time like water through a sieve, yet it also lingers in the garden's small sounds.