James Merrill

 

Presently at our touch the teacup stirred,  
Then circled lazily about 
From A to Z. The first voice heard 
(If they are voices, these mute spellers-out)  
Was that of an engineer 

Originally from Cologne. 
Dead in his 22nd year 
Of cholera in Cairo, he had KNOWN 
NO HAPPINESS. He once met Goethe, though. 

Goethe had told him: PERSEVERE. 

Our blind hound whined. With that, a horde  
Of voices gathered above the Ouija board,  
Some childish and, you might say, blurred  
By sleep; one little boy 
Named Will, reluctant possibly in a ruff 

Like a large-lidded page out of El Greco, pulled  
Back the arras for that next voice, 

Cold and portentous: ALL IS LOST. 
FLEE THIS HOUSE. OTTO VON THURN UND TAXIS.  
OBEY. YOU HAVE NO CHOICE. 

Frightened, we stopped; but tossed 
Till sunrise striped the rumpled sheets with gold. 
Each night since then, the moon waxes,  
Small insects flit round a cold torch 
We light, that sends them pattering to the porch . . . 

But no real Sign. New voices come, 
Dictate addresses, begging us to write; 
Some warn of lives misspent, and all of doom  
In way’s that so exhilarate 
We are sleeping sound of late. 

Last night the teacup shattered in a rage.  
Indeed, we have grown nonchalant 
Towards the other world. In the gloom here,  
our elbows on the cleared 
Table, we talk and smoke, pleased to be stirred 

Rather by buzzings in the jasmine, by the drone 
Of our own voices and poor blind Rover’s wheeze,  
Than by those clamoring overhead, 
Obsessed or piteous, for a commitment 
We still have wit to postpone 

Because, once looked at lit 
By the cold reflections of the dead 
Risen extinct but irresistible, 
Our lives have never seemed more full, more real,  
Nor the full moon more quick to chill.