Poems From Providence - The Poet's Press

II.
Past-midnight, Providence was wide awake.
“The Raven” was requested, recited.
Then arm in arm he walked with Pabodie
to a Chinese laundry’s doorway; from there,
having passed a yellow paper beneath it,
and waiting a seeming eternity,
the two poets entered a passageway
far into the hillside, into a damp room,
a ratty, fungoid, wet-walled warren
where a dozen reclining sleepers lay,
and beside them a dozen expiring pipes,
and Poe consented to stay.
When that was done, when dreams
beyond Coleridge, of galaxies borne
on a cosmic wind, of worlds created
from mere thoughts, and as readily destroyed
convinced him of his godhood, and madness —
and that was quite enough of that, he fled.
Alone as ever, and having walked
Mr. Pabodie to his High Street home,
Poe did what it was Poe’s nature to do:
at every moment the most awful thing
he could think of. He stood, at last,
at the foot of St. John’s churchyard.
And there were sounds, and with raven hair and
night-dark great-coat he passed for shadow
within shadow as he climbed the hill,
and he saw them, and what they were doing.
And the man fled. And the shrouded spectre
rose up from a cold lime table marker
and her white shroud billowed around her
and parted so she was full upon him
in her nakedness, a lamia, her eyes afire —
he felt her will like a maelstrom, insatiable,