Edgar Athletic Poe.

Smith, Ron

Edgar Athletic Poe

   He would have preferred that middle moniker,
   hated Allan, name and nemesis, and saw
   himyoungself Byronic, sardonic, satiric, imperial, no
   less aquatic, who growing up barely
   in Richmond fought the tide
   from Mayo's Bridge to Warwick Bar,
   emerging from the summer flood blistered heroic
   on face and shoulder.

   Sometimes generous, typically mercurial, generally
   admired, perceptibly unleaderly, one May morning
   elected by the boys champion
   in an arcing sprint round Mr. Jefferson's capitol columns.
   Headmaster Clarke kicked bright dust all the way
   back to class, muttering Latin ...
   Slight vertically and horizontally, but well-made, sinewy, active,

   graceful, daring, in sport he was facile princeps,
   swift of unclubbed foot, elastic leaper high
   and far, most enduring swimmer, and, O so rare, boxer
      extraordinaire,
   older than the others, having crossed
   the ocean, gotten both ahead and behind,
   the plucky orphan, so refined,
   allowed his skull alarming pummeling, then
   table-turning, swarmed one Selden, lumbering, winded, stung

   wincing round the dooryard, artfully peppered and salted,
   the big man uncled. Poe declaimed a little Horace,
   walked home alone, home to wealthy, stingy, philandering
   Allan and dying, always dying Fanny,
   languishing for love, who'd run her fingers through
   the boy's poetic hair, search for his famous mother there
   in those gray eyes where Allan saw only

   the poisonous fog of Russell Square, where the Englished child
   had first thinned to a razor. It was all downhill
   into impoverished adulthood when Allan
   yanked the orphan for gambling with gentlemen.
   The boy who'd esteemed a proper fight, leap, run, swim had to claw
   his way to a decent dinner, decent family, rep
   as a man with a brilliant brain as well as the body
   nature somehow lent him. The record shows

   some shameful Northern scuffles, nothing Queensbury
   or remotely cricket. Midway
   through a decade of drudgery, dogfights, dunning, despair,
   in Fordham he laughing split his trousers
   leapfrogging with Sissy on a picnic perfect day. After she died
   there was one last long jump, a challenge
   Poe issued on a woodland stroll. He bested them all

   but broke his good mood along with his gaiters,
   "long worn and carefully kept." Barefoot, he limped back
   to the cottage where Muddy nearly wept. But
   he'd turned over a new alcohol leaf, so maybe,
   she supposed, he could sell a little
   metrical grief for a new pair of shoes.