Barbara Ungar

Better Ghosts

for Stu

We loved old black-and-white movies. After The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, we sat stunned: we’d both misremembered the ending the same way. When Lucia dies, Captain Gregg comes back, holding his hand out to help her, an ever-radiant Gene Tierney, rise from her aged corpse. Rather than walking downstairs and out the front door, we think they pass the telescope and through the French doors onto the widow’s walk, and out over the sea. You wrote a poem about it. And I keep waiting for you to appear, like Rex Harrison, laughing. I’ve begged you to haunt me. So far, just tiny visitations: haiku waft out of books in your loose, lefty scrawl—

geese flying off
    into the fog
    taking me with them

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About the Author

Barbara Ungar (pictured here with Stuart Bartow) is the author of Haiku in English (Stanford Humanities Honors Essay, 1978) as well as nine volumes of longer poems, most recently After Naming the Animals (The Word Works, 2024). She has published haibun in Drifting Sands Haibun  and Haibun Today, and haiku in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Acorn, Akitsu Quarterly, and others. www.barbaraungar.net

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