Lakeside, first light; waking in the bed I share
with her: she sits, curled up, in the adjacent chair---
eighteen years' beauty in that lace nightgown;
her small, delectable feet bare,
soles already dirty from pacing the floor.
That unaccustomed frown
not meant to be malign:
she searches for a metaphor,
else a simile,
that can define
the thing of which she writes, the monstrosity
cobbled from cadavers by Victor Frankenstein.
Starward
[jlc]
Author's Notes/Comments:
I first encountered Mary Shelley's great creation, the Frankenstein Monster, on Christmas Day, 1963 (which is why the Four Seasons' song, "December'63," resonates so well for me). An only child herself, she taught me---in ways I cannot clearly articulate---how to be an only child; and, the daughter of a verbally abusive father, she taught me that the situation with my own parents would eventually end. The next month, on what I believe to be around the midnight cusp of January 24-25, 1964, I first saw a portion of Karloff's performance, as the Monster, in The Bride Of Frankenstein.
Mary Shelley's use of some lines from John Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, was the very first poetry to which I was exposed as an elementary school student. (I remember sitting in the bathtub and reciting just those few lines.) While John Milton was the first poet I studied intentionally (and, as my across the street neighbor, Doris H, would say, obsessively), Mary Shelley pointed me to him.
Due to her influence on my early life, I did my sophomore project, a bibliography of a hundred sources---books and articles---about Frankenstein.
At this Christmas season, fifty-four years after meeting her signature creation, this poem, imagining her at a difficult moment, came to me; and I feel these notes, however verbose, should be appended to acknowledge what she has done for me.
