For Memorial Day: "Mostly Ghosts" by Bee Donley

Bee Donley's debut collection of poems Mostly Ghosts (2012) begins with a ghost story told in a smoky bar, Glenn Miller's music playing on the jukebox. As veteran flyers are talking, one swears that his wingman, shot down one day over the Chanel, was back in position the next day: I could see him plainly through the mist.

Bee remembers, "We, the wives and girlfriends, listened and smiled, / ...Loved you extravagantly with our eyes and hands / Knowing we were the unseen." The men's wartime experiences, more compelling than peacetime, has made ghosts of the women who loved them.

[PHOTO: Bee Donley in her late 80s, looking just as I remember her from her late 50s. Photo from an interview with the Jackson Clarion-Ledger]

Among the men she addresses as "you" is one she married, whose grave she visits 46 years after his "untimely" death to discover that the date is wrong. "I wonder," she asks, "if the ghost of that once smiling flier knows how wrong" ("Burial Ground" 6). In these few lines, Donley implies that the ghosts of war never let go of him, and we can guess at the young father's suicide -- something I heard about, never from Bee.


Bee Donley remembers another ghost between lines of the liturgy for "Memorial Day: Morning Prayer" (9). In her telling, a young pilot named Peter Joseph O'Toole becomes vivid to us, though she cannot remember his appearance, or whether he kissed her. "Yet the morning heat walking beneath the live oaks / to the campus P.O. for his daily letters seems real," and his imploring her, I know you probably won't answer, but I've never known a Southern girl before; it would mean a lot to hear from you. But he was killed in his first mission, "And now over sixty years later I pray for this boy I remember only by his name." So do we.


A Marine pilot, her brother, is another ghost made vivid in life and poignant in death through a multi-layered poem, "Reading Wordsworth and Remembering." Beginning with an epigraph from Wordsworth about "the best portion of a good man's life" being "nameless, unremembered acts / of kindness and of love," the poem tells the anecdote of her younger brother's building box kites to delight Bee's five-year-old daughter, his niece. One tangles in a tree; the other falls in a sharp downdraft. Bee shifts to the image of the young pilot's plane suddenly plunged into the sea by downdraft, leaving her "searching cloudless skies for," in one of Wordsworth's most famous lines, "trails of glory."


Other poems in the collection conjure the life of a Southern daughter of a Mississippi landowner. What stands out the most is something she says she learned from her father: "He taught me not to cry... I do hold my shoulders up."


Even enduring treatment for cancer, Bee Donley sat up in bed with plumped pillows and unruffled sheets to offer her apprehensive visitors wine, her hair perfect, collar raised, robe falling about her in a semi-circle, slippered feet tucked to one side -- as if she were posing for a magazine spread on boudoir fashion. Bee was my oldest colleague at St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Mississippi, so poised on her high heels, so tireless in her many roles at the school that, seeing how unbowed she was by cancer, I figured she was immortal.


So to see her obituary pop up during a Google search came as something of a surprise, though nearly 40 years passed between then and her death in January 2018. But I was delighted to learn that she published poetry in her 90s. Mostly Ghosts is an apt title for her first collection, because she lives on in the lines.