Summoning lost spirits.

T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats
Communicated with the dead
Speaking in unheard tongues
Ah to command a table at midnight
Toasting spirits with Champagne,
A bottle and a few chanted words
To summon five spirits:
Michael Wells the brilliant misanthrope
Vexing the world, died of Hepatitis C
We could discuss the death of modern art
Rest, perturbed spirt, rest
My sensuous traveler would come next
Rebecca
Sister of New Orleans
A thick spread of blonde hair, blue eyes,
To change the world through art her fervent hope
Forging a hundred books, a thousand odes,
Paintings in the style of no one
Died of cancer under Mexican skies
Next I call Uncle Emmett
Who faced the end stoically
Diabetes the family curse
Can he feel the currents of the bay
Where his scattered ashes float?
What should I write, I might inquire
Has our story been sung enough?
Father follows, the handsome man whose mirth
Set dinner guests on rolls of laughter, swore
Allegiance to his Church, his land, his Democrats
The Savior took him early for he died at 53
From a failing heart
My how we could catch up on passing years
while sharing a glass
Does he dance in the surf with Brother Emmett,
Holding up his rolled trouser cuffs
As they did that lost summer twilight?
Last but not least to quote the Bard again
I conjure my beloved taken suddenly
Karen Lea Smith
Her face in the garden, on the balcony
The playing cards worn
From morning games of solitaire
Gentle wife who yearned to meet Father
Perhaps now they can converse
About what never happened on this earth
Farewell my sweet
I lack a valid parayer
I have staged this conversaton in my head
A scene I never thought I'd rehearse
But around the table sit empty chairs
No spirit, no Pentecostal fire,
No converging dead,
Only that passage of brutal time
To dull desire before we find
The elusive truth