I walked past H.P. Lovecraft’s grave three times
before I found it. It wasn’t a ritual;
it’s just easy to miss.
A little grey headstone, hidden from the footpath
in the shadow of a larger monolith.
The stone itself is nothing much to see.
It’s faded, takes a few readings
to discern the birth and death dates, the hubristic declaration:
“I am Providence.”
Mate, you’re not even Swan Point Cemetery.
I must say, I expected more from you.
No stone could ever match the public image
(that desiccated man with the black suit and the classically proportioned skull).
But still. Where are the tentacles? The statues to a degenerate pantheon?
The florid epitaphs overusing the word ‘cyclopean’?
The dead man’s carnival in purple prose?
Where is the race of darkly mindless monster worshippers?
Well, I suppose he’ll always have the fans.
And some of us have made a go of it.
There’s a printout of his face, scarred by the intermittent drizzle.
There’s a couple of pebbles with a cartoon Cthulhu and a psychedelic spelling-out of his name.
There’s about seventeen cents in rusting brown change
(which a website later tells me is because he died penniless).
There’s a couple of cigarette ends
and an inexplicable tangerine.
And in the frigid tourist afternoon I couldn't think
about artists separated from their Complicated Legacies,
about the cuteness of a handmade eldritch plushie,
about the cheeky thrills I once snatched on English school buses
from battered Wordsworth Editions
or from YouTube explainers of deep lore for video games I would never play;
the prose dense and sweaty
as an adolescent mind,
and me, not comprehending, not always enjoying,
but not stopping either,
about how he would not approve of my marriage
which was the reason I was in Rhode Island anyway.
Instead, I only thought
about the turf worn smooth before this stone
by endless, unseen pilgrims, and myself,
and all the other graves’ unrumpled grass.
The strange perversions of his age may die
But still there’s something here we can’t deny.