Ouija

It is a chilly god, a god of shades,

Rises to the glass from his black fathoms.

At the window, those unborn, those undone

Assemble with the frail paleness of moths,

An envious phosphorescence in their wings.

Vermillions, bronzes, colors of the sun

In the coal fire will not wholly console them.

Imagine their deep hunger, deep as the dark

For the blood-heat that would ruddlr or reclaim.

The glass mouth sucks blooh-heat from my forefinger.

The old god dribbles, in return, his words.

The old god, too, write aureate poetry

In tarnished modes, maundering among the wastes,

Fair chronicler of every foul declension.

Age, and ages of prose, have uncoiled

His talking whirlwind, abated his excessive temper

When words, like locusts, drummed the darkening air

And left the cobs to rattle, bitten clean.

Skies once wearing a blue, divine hauteur

Ravel above us, mistily descend,

Thickening with motes, to a marriage with the mire.

He hymns the rotten queen with saffron hair

Who has saltier aphrodisiacs

Than virgins' tears. That bawdy queen of death,

Her wormy couriers aer at his bones.

Still he hymns juice of her, hot nectarine.

I see him, horny-skinned and tough, construe

What flinty pebbles and ploughable upturns

As ponderable tokens of her love.

He, godly, doddering, spells

No succinct Gabriel from the letters here

But floridly, his amorous nostalgias.