On Matthew Zapruder's Come On All You Ghosts

But what is the use, exactly, of talking to people through poems? What would it mean not to let them down? An answer lurks, perhaps, in the “dark / before daylight” that comes at the close of “Poem for Ferlinghetti” and that looks ahead to the dim opening of “Come On All You Ghosts.” Here, Zapruder hearkens to a “little cough” and discovers a

death’s head

glow in the dark key chain
that lights up and moans
when I press the button

on top of its skull
and the ghost
I shyly name Aglow.

Zapruder’s shy call to that spirit echoes both his first address to the reader and the reader’s own mental evocation of the same words: “Are you there Aglow / I said in my mind / reader, exactly the way // you just heard it / in yours about four / poem time units ago.” The “together” of writer and reader in “poem time” hopes for a “together” across other timely divisions — language overcoming the mortal divide between the living and the dead as well as the mental alienation of the poet and his audience.

There are many ghosts, plainly, whom Zapruder would reach, since the poems of Come On are full of loss and shadows; their evocation builds a poem-to-poem rhythm that culminates in the volume’s final lines. That first named ghost in the title poem sends readers back to the second poem in the book, which is titled “Aglow” and begins with another instance of direct, if modest, address: “Hello everyone, hello you. Here we are under this sky. / Where were you Tuesday?” As this poem moves from a random ambulance call to a remembrance of historical atrocity and personal loss, the poet is constantly “talking to you with a voice that pretends to be shy and actually is,” and he concludes with the grieving admission that he is “always in search of the question / that might make you ask me one in return.” Imagined reciprocity mitigates absence without denying its pain. Throughout, Zapruder’s work would build communities of the admittedly mortal as comfort for their inevitable mortality.