Like the classic poets he studies to exhaustion—Homer, Milton, Virgil, and all those other dead and venerated versifiers—my poet formally invoked his muse.
My poet invoked me.
His voice swept through the purple midnight air and traveled over the Elysian hills of Albemarle County, reaching my ears in a parish churchyard—my new home after the other muses attacked me, when I found no proper cemetery in Charlottesville.
“Come, lonely genius of my natal shore,
From cave or bower, wild glen, or mountain hoar;
And while by ocean’s rugged bounds I muse,
Thy solemn influence o’er my soul diffuse.”
The words were the work of the poet William Hamilton Drummond, but the passion of the plea behind them belonged to Edgar Allan Poe.
Yet I remain in the churchyard, ignoring Poe’s summons.
Even though I know he cannot hear me, I call back to my poet: “You have that stone heart, filled with a drop of my soul, and that’s all the help you’ll get from me. I want them to see me, and you want me to remain your secret, you frustrating, stubborn boy!”
During the afternoons in my new graveyard home, a choir gathers to practice their hymns of celebration inside a steepled church so pure, so white, it looks like the angels sliced a piece of heaven like a cake and laid it down on the plate of this green river valley. A flock of muses in dove form perches on the roof of the church whenever the singers meet, and with watchful, glossy eyes, they stare down at my resting spot on a sepulcher below them. They know I’m a thief of artists, but they’re too polite to chase me away.
With my eyes closed, my silk hat resting on my breast, I inhale the choir’s hymns, as airy and as sweet as meringue, or so I assume, and I fight the urge to refashion their songs into frightful funeral dirges.
At night I roam among the light of the churchyard spirits, who beg me to convince my artist to tell their stories, but none of them pull at my heart quite like the spirits of Richmond.
One night in either March or April, when a full moon beams its silvery haze across the graves, a young gentleman spirit steps around his tombstone. He wears his hair tied back with a bow on his neck, and he’s dressed in a ruffled cravat, a short coat with a long tail, and breeches that end beneath his knees, revealing a pair of silk stockings that stretch down to buckled shoes.
“May I kiss those red lips of yours, my bonny darling?” he asks me through his own lips of misted blue. “You’ve been tempting me with your beauty every night you wander among us.”
“Are you certain you believe I’m beautiful?” I ask, removing my hat so he can see my sleek head of feathers. “Aren’t you terrified of me?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing terrifies us here, miss, except for the fear of being forgotten. Look at poor Betty Randolph’s stone over there. Her name is almost gone.”
I investigate the thin gray stone he means, seeing the faded indentations of letters. I rub my fingertips over the dips in poor Betty’s name, worried that this same fate might befall our beloved Jane Stanard, despite the grandeur of her monument. A lump swells in my throat.
“The kindest thing you can do for the dead,” says the young man who requested the kiss, “is to weave their names into art.”
With a nod of understanding, I don the hat once more and scale a tree that leads to the bell tower of the church, where I warm myself for the night.
And I wait, and I wait, and I wait, and I wait for my poet to cast off his fears of his fate . . .