“The Last New World,” Roy Bentley’s poetic tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, is a milestone for Roy and for this site. It is the 60th post from a writer of poetry and fiction in the tradition of John Steinbeck—and the 400th post at SteinbeckNow.com, founded four years ago to celebrate an enduring author who wrote fiction for a living but growing up excelled at writing verse.—Ed.

The Last New World

This time, the magic number for E.A. Poe is thirteen:
the number of insipid whiskeys he has downed today.

A story will circulate, afterwards, that he voted once
too often. A joke to say what its poets are to America.

It’s about the money, his foster father argued. And then
left him nothing. Not one cent. There were other deaths.

And now he prowls the backstreets, spectacularly broke.
Settles against the warmer stones of a building, wanting

not to freeze to death in a world of lit and burning stoves.
Tonight, Baltimore is as frosty as his dead foster father’s

heart. Books of poems and stories are selling but not well.
He has written that he must wait for a well-heeled widow,

any sort of rescue. Says it happened before. The deliverer
a Baltimore woman. At the first success of “The Raven”—

that January in New York, he waved off a tide of street
orphans flapping raffish arms and crying Nevermore!

There he was. Not happy, but ready to be thought so.
There she was. Not an archangel exactly, but smiling.

He’s coatless, a thin shirt no match for autumnal gusts
sputtering gaslamps. If God exists, it isn’t to love poets.

For Deni Naffziger