down the road makes it in his barn. It is the only medicament Poe has found that causes Sissy improvement.
Darling Virginia, what she does for him! So infirm, her health so fragile, although she remained plump and round-faced, her voice so sweet still when she rises to sing his favorite song, “Come, Rest in This Bosom.”
For all the world he looks beaten, even before he starts on his journey. He fingers his one joy. With him in their canvas case, now stuffed in his greatcoat pocket, he carries his augments, his talismans: his steel pen, the nib worn perfectly through use to the slant of his hand, his pocket notebook, his precious ink in its heavy corked ceramic pot.
With his instruction Sissy concocted the brew. She is so proud to help him with his work. The tint, a careful mixture of red and black, heavy to the red, a single drop of black added, two, three, so the black dye drifts in the red, transforms the crimson into the color of blood.
The pocket notebook, buff pages cut meticulously by her, perfectly folded, bound with leather thong, the smooth paper protected by a buttery-soft black-dyed goatskin-leather cover.
He buoys himself. He tells himself once more the idea to go to New York is a good one. After all, Gotham is the literary capital of America, and E.A.P. no small American literary figure.
Adding t to Poe, he reminds himself, makes poet.
Truth be told, in Philadelphia nothing has met his expectation. Nothing has been satisfactory. How many tales has he published? Sixty? How many poems? Reviews? Yet he has nothing. For how many weeks must his family be forced to eat bread and molasses and nothing more? How many times can he expect his dearest Muddie to show staunch face at the Christian mission seeking charity?
For a year he was employed as editor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, but some of those stints with drinking had poisoned the minds of detractors and ended his job, although he assured friends that temperance was not an issue, that intemperance was as far removed from his habits as day from night.
The true issue, if you want to know, was the feral stupidity of the publisher Billy Burton.
Bilious Billy, he called him.
Bilious Billy of the title page.
Bilious Billy the buffoon!
Once the man had been a successful comic actor. He had come from England with great success and fanfare. That was before he had incredibly taken on the mistaken mantle of publisher and—even more laughable—writer!
What made the fool think himself capable of such pretense?
Haggard!
Billy Burton—this man—had the audacity to warn him, to warn Poe—Poe the Poet—that he must tone down his reviews, to rid himself of his ill feelings toward his brother authors.
No matter. Monetary need rewards its own humiliation.
“The troubles of the world have given a morbid tone to your feelings,” Burton had lectured Poe upon his firing. “It is your duty to discourage such outpour. Take some exercise, man! Rouse your energies. Care!”
The ignorance of him! The arrogance!
Upon reviewing his recently published “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the Philadelphia Inquirer had proclaimed: “This tale proves Mr. Poe a man of genius.”
Mere puffery, you might say. But his peers, the people who know, his fellow literati, respect him. Fear him.
Fear his mind. Fear his tongue. Fear his wit. Fear his pen.
How many times had Poe explained to Burton that he worked from a mental necessity to satisfy his task and his love of art? Fame forms no motive for him. “What can I care for the judgment of a multitude, every individual of which I despise?” he insisted. “A man of large purse has usually a very little soul which he keeps in it.”
On that note Poe bolted from the editorial offices of the Gentleman’s Magazine, leaving his ex-boss Bilious Billy staring after him, his beady little eyes swallowed by his fleshy face.
Poe’s desire is to answer to no one but himself. To sit as his own arbiter. To his thinking, to coin one’s brain into silver, at the nod of a master, is the hardest task on earth. He loathes to work for another imbecile again. He will tell you the greatest number of those who hold high place in our poetical literature are absolute ninnies. Nincompoops. Name your names: Longfellow, Cooper, Irving, Halleck, Bryant. Bloated reputations, derivative aesthetics, undeserving practitioners.
The laudation of the unworthy is to the worthy the most bitter of all wrongs, Poe would tell you. Yet no man living loved the praise of others better than he. So he trods the smoothly cobbled streets of Philadelphia on his way to Central Station, to some opportunity, to the unknown. Head down, keeping his eyes upon the ground, studying the herringbone of cobblestones, the stereotomy of the streets. Benjamin Franklin once said the Philadelphian could always be told from the New Yorker. New York was so crudely cobbled the poor Gothamite found himself listing merely from habit while walking fair Quakerdom’s smooth stones.
Poe himself was fairly listing at that very moment, with each step the momentary shreds of optimism and resolve falling away from him, him fairly falling, falling into that strange beaten posture of his, as if fate has had her final say and there is nothing more to be done.
During the remainder of a dull, dark, and soundless day, he goes on, his West Point greatcoat pulled close. Philadelphia so quiet that day, as every day, striking him as Sunday.
The wind is shifting. Above him the cloud cover is shredding. As he walks the sky splits apart, revealing slivers of bright blue and streaks of glistening yellow sunshine. He straightens hopefully to his full height. The crack of blue sky and warming golden rays no more than a mere wink and nod for him, him rejecting any signs of any good in the cosmos, as transient as a glint of gold in the ether.
He coughs.
He removes a frayed clean handkerchief from his pocket and presses it to his lips. God save her. God, please, save his innocent little wifey.
Somewhere Deep in the Distance Stereotomy
Somewhere deep in the distance, far away, yet perhaps surprisingly near, as the train slowly chugs forward out of Central Station, Philadelphia, picks up speed, and rumbles out of the city, bound for points north-northeast and New York, six hours away, the poet hears bells. His eyes widen with their knell.
He had miscalculated. As he stood in the vast lobby, inexorably alone, at the ticket booth, a sodden man in round steel-rimmed glasses staring out at him from behind the cage, he realized he had not sufficient funds for fare to Hoboken and still enough coin to cross the Hudson on the ferry.
He begged the clerk for consideration, received none, had been forced to settle
