Halloween: Séance

Well, since it is Halloween, may as well include some spooky stuff. Not Edgar Allan Poe spooky or M. Night Shyamalan spooky: the real weird stuff, the stuff you have no categories or rules for. 


I'll start with this one: James Merrill spent a lot of time over twenty years using a ouija board to supposedly communicate with the dead. He published an epic collection of all of these voices under the title "The Changing Light at Sandover." There's a lot of controversy as to whether he actually thought he was speaking with spirits or found it just a convenient trick to help write some poems; regardless there's some wonderful macabre moments here.

Voices from the Other World

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.