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 ruddle or reclaim.
 The glass mouth sucks blood-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 are at his bones.
 Still he hymns juice of her, hot nectarine.
 I see him, horny-skinned and tough, construe
 What flinty pebbles the plough blade upturns
 As ponderable tokens of her love.
 He, godly, doddering, spells
 No succinct Gabriel from the letters here
 But floridly, his amorous nostalgias.