Poems From Providence - The Poet's Press

“I did not note it then.”
“Tell what you saw,
and I will say if it has some common thread
with what some have said about that hillside
and what transpires at night there.”
Poe turned over his manuscript, half-read
and half-invented as he spoke memory:
“But stay, pale Prophetess! Hold back the moon
And those hoarded clouds that would conceal it!
Return and calm my frensied observing
Of a glowing form that rises — a form
I thought dead, that sleeps no more — it mounts
To speak its dread name into my hearing.
It spoke — not words in any human tongue! —
Thank God it did not speak that name or mine! —
A kind of half-whistled ululation.
Its eyes, two darkly luminous nebulae,
Caught mine, and sparked, and spurned me.
Then, folding in its shroud-like trail, it leaped
With superhuman will to the trellis,
Up, up, vertiginous, three storeys up
And either to roof or into attic
It vanished: all this in my one heartbeat,
In the darkness of one cloud’s passing.”
“What did you make of it?” asked Pabodie.
“You do not strike me, Poe, as a ‘ghost’ man.”
“Ghosts, no! Place emanations, if you will,
or astral doubles our souls send out and just
as easily call back. Call them wish forms,
mesmeric force , all manner of ill-will,:
there are many things in the universe,
and things we call to a semblance of life
by dreaming them or giving name.” He paused.