Jill Szoo Wilson

It is common for the dead to be spared
the morning paper.

Edgar Allan Poe, however, receives his
through six feet of rain.

I know because I am he.

Someone dropped it near the cemetery wall.
The pages opened in the mud,
crinkled and soggy, bleeding ink.
A rush of gutter water carried it
between the gate and the grave.

“Special delivery,” I imagined,

as a black column faced the ground,
reading to the worms
and to me.

The words had spread,
but not yet enough
to curl or tear.

Good.
I had little else to do.

Someone had written in the paper
that Edgar Allan Poe was dead.

So far, correct.

He added a bottle,
an alley,
a wild eye fixed on nothing.

“Oh,” I paused.
“Is that my eye he reports?”
I had never imagined it wild. 
And here I thought I'd known 
my own eye.

Reading further,
I discovered curses in my coat pockets.
He had turned the pockets inside out
for everyone to see.

At the bottom,
the writer signed himself Ludwig,
which was hardly enough of a name
for a man who knew so much about mine.

I tried the name against the coffin lid.

The coffin offered no opinion.
Neither did the name.
It tugged at something
I could not yet place.

So I read the column again.

Whoever had borrowed Ludwig
had known me while I lived.
He had taken our old quarrels
and sharpened them in print.

I looked away from the wet page
and remembered an anthology:
The Poets and Poetry of America.

Its editor had printed
three of my poems inside
and paid me in advance
to review the book.

I praised the undertaking,
then objected to several men
he had called poets.

When I left Graham’s,
that same editor took my desk
for a larger wage.

Later, I carried his book
into lecture halls
and told the audience
whom he should have left out
and whom he should have let in.

The face returned.
The name did not.

Then, farther down the column,
I found “Annabel Lee.”

Ludwig printed the poem
beneath his account of my character.
Before it, he wrote
that I had placed the manuscript
in the writer’s own hands
before leaving New York.

I remembered the packet.
I remembered the hand.

“That was careless,” I said.

Rufus Wilmot Griswold.

I spoke the name aloud.
This time, the coffin
gasped as if offended by the audacity.

Above me, a man lifted the paper
with two fingers.
He shook off the rain
and carried Griswold’s Poe home.

At his breakfast table,
Poe lay beside the butter.

His wife read Ludwig aloud.
The spoon stopped halfway to her mouth.
The lamp guttered in the sealed room.
A child reached for the page,
but she folded it once
and placed her hand on top.

Something scratched beneath her palm.

By noon, the column had reached
the barber,
the clerk behind the counter,
the woman waiting for the omnibus.

Each received the same Poe.

None had the pleasure of meeting me.

The rain stopped above the cemetery.
The gutter emptied.
The worms returned to their work.

Below them, I considered the bottle
Griswold had placed in my hand.

"I've never wanted a drink
so badly in my life,"
I huffed.

Unfortunately,
my life had already passed.
That is one thing they neglect
to mention beforehand.

The dead are served nothing.

Eventually, rain found the cedar seam.
One drop gathered above my mouth.

I lay beneath it,
my lips parted.

—Jill Szoo Wilson

Historical note: One disadvantage of dying before your enemies is that they may volunteer to write your biography. Two days after Edgar Allan Poe’s death in 1849, Rufus Wilmot Griswold published a hostile obituary under the name “Ludwig.” He later edited Poe’s collected works and expanded the attack into a biographical memoir, a task made considerably easier by the absence of rebuttal.