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The Medium
“When I’m sitting here alone,
the dear Lord uses half his energy.
This table weighs thirty pounds.
He has to magnetize my hands.”
Adele Tinning’s hands pose a question
I can’t explain. I follow her gestures,
the threads she unwinds, imagining wires,
special muscles in her arms,
until a breeze fluffs the curtains in the window.
“That’s a spirit, dear, that puff of wind.”
In a polaroid, a bolt of light
forks from her infant son’s head.
Honeycombed spirals pass under the table
whose leg glows blue.
She touches a seam in the bird’s-eye maple.
She calls her spirit-guides Matthew and John
but Zoro comes in. “He doesn’t touch the floor
like the others. Ask him to tell you what stage you’re in.”
Seven stages like the seven ages of man—
He says I have only Love to learn.
I ask for my grandmother, who enters the table,
tapping out E-S-T-H-E-R against linoleum.
She makes it creak and tip in my lap
(“She must have talked fast because she’s tipping fast”).
Wishes me fortune and the table-leg slams.
“Send out a light-beam, they’ll come right over,
even from China. There are souls on all of Saturn’s rings.
A spirit can travel through heat or cold,
it’s at zero degrees,
so if you feel a little chill, you’ll know.”
Adele Tinning’s hands pose a question
I can’t explain,
her question to Captain James McFeron
two days after his plane went down.
A lump of flesh was found
jammed in a phonebook but his words
kept traveling until they found her,
until the passengers touched her forehead one by one.
Moments before, we all left our bodies
and watched it hit the ground.
—from The Red Handkerchief and Other Poems (Dos Madres Press, 2014, 2021).
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