Always bad news from the Ouija board.
We spelt out the alphabet, fringed the arena
Of your coffee table with the letters.
Two goals: ‘Yes’ at one end, ‘No’ at the other.
Then leaned, our middle fingers lolling
On the bottom of the upturned glass. Frivolity
Darkening to solemn apprehension.
Respectfully, we summoned a spirit.
It was easy as fishing for eels
In the warm summer darkness. Hardly a minute
Before the glass began to nose at the letters,
Then to circle thoughtfully. Finally, ‘Yes’.
Something was there. A spirit offered to be named.
She nudged out her name. And she was
Despairing, depressed, pathetic. She concocted
Macabre, gloomy answers. Every answer
Was ‘rottenness’ or ‘worms’ or simply ‘bones’.
She left a peculiar guilt – a befouled
Feeling of jeopardy, a sense that days
Would be needed now to cleanse us
Of the pollution. Some occult pickpocket
Had slit the soul’s silk and fingered us.
But we explained it easily: some rejected
Dream’s drop-out had found its way to the glass
Where the power had gone to its head.
Far better
We fish up discredited clairvoyance,
Assume we hummed on all creation’s wavelengths,
Attune Ouija to the frequencies
Of omniscience, of prophecy.
A case of locating the right spirit.
Over the brink of letters and called down
Into the well of Ouija. This time
We announced the requirements in firm tones,
And as the glass began to prowl repeated
Clearly the qualifications for the job.
Suddenly the glass, with a whizzing flourish,
Was wrenched almost from under our fingers to ‘Yes’.
As if we’d hooked a fish right there at the surface.
This one promised only truth. To prove it
He offered to fill in that week’s football coupon
And make our fortune in the next five minutes.
He picked thirteen draws. ‘That’s not many.’
‘Just enough,’ he replied. He was right –
But spaced all down the column of matches
His accurately picked-off thirteen draws,
The whole clutch, were adrift by a single match
Ahead of the day’s results. ‘Too eager?’ ‘Yes.’
He apologized. He swore to correct himself.
Five days then of tiptoe internal hush.
Finally the stalk, the taking aim –
And there again he got the total number,
Eighteen, precisely. But his cluster, spot on
If it had not been split
And adrift in two groups in opposite directions –
Two before, three behind – fell
Through the safety nets I’d spread for his errors.
‘Gambling fever’s beginning to give him the shakes.
He’s getting too interested in some of the teams.
He’s wanting winners and losers, and he’s losing
Simple solidarity with the truth.
There’s a lesson here,’ I thought, as I watched
His week-by-week collapse to the haphazard,
Juggling hopes and fantasy, human and anxious.
He preferred to talk about poetry. He made poems.
He spelled one out:
‘Nameless he shall be
The myriad of daughters
Tending his image
Washing the mountain slopes with tears
To slake the parched plains’.
‘Is that a good poem?’
I asked him. ‘That poem’, he declared,
‘Is a great poem.’ His favourite poet
Was Shakespeare. His favourite poem King Lear.
And his favourite line in King Lear? ‘Never
Never never never never’ – but
He could not remember what followed.
We remembered but he could not remember.
When we pressed him he circled, baffled, then:
‘Why shall I ever be perplexed thus?
I’d hack my arm off like a rotten branch
Had it betrayed me as my memory.’
Where did he find that? Or did he invent it?
It was an odd joke. He liked jokes.
More often serious. Once, as we bent there, I asked:
‘Shall we be famous?’ and you snatched your hand upwards
As if something had grabbed it from under.
Your tears flashed, your face was contorted,
Your voice cracked, it was thunder and flash together:
‘And give yourself to the glare? Is that what you want?
Why should you want to be famous?
Don’t you see – fame will ruin everything.’
I was stunned. I thought I had joined
Your association of ambition
To please you and your mother,
To fulfil your mother’s ambition
That we be ambitious. Otherwise
I’d be fishing off a rock
In Western Australia. So it seemed suddenly. You wept.
You wouldn’t go on with Ouija. Nothing
I could think of could explain
Your shock and crying. Only
Maybe you’d picked up a whisper I could not hear,
Before our glass could stir, some still small voice:
‘Fame will come. Fame especially for you.
Fame cannot be avoided. And when it comes
You will have paid for it with your happiness,
Your husband and your life.’