The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

October. Poe in Baltimore. Poe

At the end, going North, away

From Virginia, keeping promises

Despite the black beak of despair,

Laid over, waiting for the train,

But just now, drunk, out of the coop,

Leaning in Lombard Street

Against the window of a store,

Making his pitched and stammered way

Toward Cooth & Sergeant’s Tavern —

(Sergeant Major Poe, First Artillery,

Honorably discharged so many years ago) —

Slow way of starts and fits,

The drink and drugs sluing his heart

Into blind staggers and sways.

Away from Virginia and toward

Virginia in the grave. She played

The harp that January night and sang,

It was a good song, too,

But so soon, so quickly a tiny vessel

Popped in her throat like a New Year’s squib

Just as she reached her last high note.

And for five years it broke and broke

Again, until she died, was laid away,

And Poe learned an awful truth:

Helter skelter or catcher in the rye,

Art kills as often as it saves.

On Lombard Street in Baltimore, memory

Twists him, presses his forehead against the glass,

His heart wheezing like wind through the cottage wall

In Fordham where Virginia lay. His heart lifts

In his chest, flaps clumsily aloft

Like a great white bird, then settles back,

And Poe is grounded, left in the lurch

As he was abandoned by his party friends

After voting all morning under a dozen names:

His own, Usher, Reynolds, Dupin, Pym,

Raising his hand again and again, taking the oath,

Swearing he was who he was and was not,

Swearing he was.

Hart Crane asked him

Nearly a century later whether he denied

The ticket, but how could he deny a thing,

He who was all things that day and none,

A multitude of beings and only one,

Leaning on a window, his forehead on the glass,

His eyes unfocused or focused deep within.

And yet he does see past Virginia

With blood on her blouse, past Elmira

Left behind in Richmond, jilted

Before she ever reached the altar,

Past even the bloated face of Edgar Poe

Reflected in the window, drawn and drawn out

In the wobbly glass, the sodden man

In a strangers threadbare clothes

With only Dr. Carters borrowed cane

Still clutched in that familiar hand,

Sees through the tortured glass

To a display of pewter and silver

Laid out within the shop, slick knives

With thin images of a singular man

Upon each blade, rounded shining cups

With a bulge-nosed alien face

In each curved surface, two large

Silver plates with his own desperate stare

Reflected plain in each, the brow,

The carved out cheeks, blue lips

Beneath the sad mustache.

But he

Looks beyond this olio of images,

These hard lies and harder truths

Displayed before him, to find

A large silver coffee urn, beknobbed

And crusted with handles and thick

Vines, blossoms and twisted ribbons,

Its surface flat and curved and rounded,

Concave, convex, and convolute,

And in its turbulent reflections

He sees a young mans face,

A young man with dark hair

And uneven eyes, a young man

Leaning on a cane with promises

To keep, a face he recognizes

But cannot name, knows but cannot claim,

That looks him steadily eye to eye.

His heart will soon calm down enough

For him to stutter on, reach Cooth &

Sergeant’s, fall onto a bench, he found,

Be carried to the hospital, lie there in fever,

Call Reynolds’ name, ease out of delirium

Only to say, gently, “Lord help my poor soul,”

And die, having for one moment on Lombard Street

Learned still another awful truth:

Pell mell or waiting just to die,

Art saves as often as it kills.