Poe's Heartfelt Lunge

They have a new Poe statue in Boston.
He is not up on a pedestal. We'll it's modern times isn't it?
He looks like a muppet. It's come to this. Welcome back to frog ponderous.
At street level he can fulfill final purpose.
To have his picture taken with people just off a tourist trolley people who have heard of him.
And Edward Everett Hale, in peace, on his pedestal, in the Public Garden, chuckles to Poe's everlasting dread.

No magical For the Union Dead quality.  Not yet.
But another poet may pass this way
with an exploding cigar of verse.
Poe's statue is in front of Leavitt's Tobacco Shop - where Pierre Salinger scarfed up the last Cubans for Kennedy - and what once was Jack's Joke Shop.

Edgar, remember our intellectual commerce? When I used to ride the train on business between Boston and New York, sometimes further to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington and further
And there was a certain patch around Rhode Island where you would speak to me. There before Connecticut that early in the foggy morning had a Moorish Hound of the Eulale quality. A set piece.

Reading biography, Dreadful Remembrance unto Death? – no, “Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance,” I learned that Poe’s trajectory mapped with the railroads of the day.
Down from Boston, up from Virginia. To New York, Again to Boston, Down to Baltimore. There still in the right fog his heartfelt lunge toward Ulame speaks.
It happened in the age of steam. And the maker has you to trudge through the sphere of jets, sweatshirts and selfies. Ah but somewhere your sad mystic eye still conjures wonder.
                                                                      -Jack Vaughan, 2014