James Merrill

 

                                                     photograph by Rollie McKenna, 1956.

Voices from the Other World

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 ways 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.