Poems From Providence - The Poet's Press

a literary man, to be sure, a lawyer
who defended atheists and defamers
of preachers, a man of calamities
whose winter cold went pleural, and killed him.
And as for Sarah’s father, “Ah, the less said,”
was all that Pabodie would offer. “And there’s
a sister we don’t speak much about.” Poe felt
unable to pry more from Pabodie, at least
so long as he remained this sober. Gossip
is best pried with the lubricant of wine.
Poe talked instead of his earlier visit,
the summer of ’45, of the moonlight
walk when he had seen Mrs. Whitman,
instantly his “Helen of Helens,” behind
the red house in its snug garden, her hand
athwart the single rose she was cutting,
the sudden turn she made, her vanishing
into the cellar door whose soundless closing
stopped his breathing, as though to profane
this vision with any sound were unthinkable.
“I’ve sent her the poem with my recollection,”
he tells Pabodie, and shows him a copy.
Pabodie reads it and says: “Ah. lovely! A blank verse
paean to our finest poet. Her eyes — what lines! —
two sweetly scintilant Venuses! She will fall
into your power, rest assured, Mr. Poe.”
“There was more to the poem,” Poe confided,
“but I ought not frighten this Helen of Helens
with the thought of an apparition I saw,
or thought I saw —”
“An apparition?”
up went one of Pabodie’s black eyebrows.
“You know their garden wall drops down
to the Episcopal churchyard, do you not?”