My poet is a swimmer, so I fight my way out of the tangled darkness of river grasses and rise above the surface, where I swim past ships and steamboats that creak and rock in the docks like arthritic old men. I swim around forested islands with slick granite shores that rise from the water as ashen mounds, lit by the cockeyed grin of the moon.
The water I swallowed during my plummet into the James engorges my body—a body already weighted down with Edgar Poe’s memories. Such heaviness would drag a weaker swimmer down to the river’s bottom—the chill of the James alone would freeze a more delicate soul—but I am neither weak nor delicate. Despite the burdens I bear, my arms plow through the night-blackened waters, and I kick my legs like a champion, with scarcely a splash or a fuss of foam in my wake. The farther I travel north, the less brackish and polluted with sewage the James tastes on my lips, and I soar out of the ugliness of the past.
For days and nights, I push upriver to the mouth of the Rivanna. A screech owl flies overhead, guiding my journey with outstretched wings gilded in sunlight and silvered by the moon, until I part ways with the James and travel northwest to Charlottesville, and Morella turns back home. The cadence of the water lapping the shores and the occasional music of a fiddle drifting through the winter-bare trees appease some of my hunger for art. Too often, however, I’m so ravenous that I don’t see straight, and I find myself briefly ensnared in fishing nets or patches of ice that slice like knives.
Sometimes I lie down for a rest amid the naked foliage on the river’s edge and listen for the sound of a heartbeat that tolls like a bell in the distance.
Hear that throbbing, thumping bell—tempting bell! What a life of liberty its melody foretells.
I won’t drown within this river, even though I’m short of breath, even though I shake and shiver, I will not give Pa one sliver of the pleasure of my death.
No!
I will not give old John Allan the satisfaction of killing me, and so I swim on, and on, and on, and on, lured by that distant, beating, haunting, taunting, palpitating poet’s heart—that muffled, melodious bell, bonging, longing for tales to tell.