letter to mary shelley

Letter to Mary Shelley

Letters to the dead, or their conversations

No longer thrive among the literati.

We’ve all grown I-bound here, and no other demonstration

Is wanted, but only a sort of lyric potpourri

- which captures our moods and days

And is put quite nicely in quaint sachets.

I’m not complaining – I turn out my quire

And sometime make a little genius patter

Illuminating the soft and hard wires

That make up my neural personal matter

According to all the best popsci bestsellers

Apparently we’re just haunts in genetic cellars.

You were born to the royal anti-royal blood

the little red riding hoods of the revolution

but grew up, Gretel-like, to brood

on the wolf that might solve your family situation.

Then he came, dressed in robes of poesie

- which is how you eloped with the romantic agony.

I should tell you, Mary, we no longer brook

long letters written with that manual drolery

- letters as long as the chapters in your  book

in the tradition of epistolary -

rather we jerk out an email or fifty

under the burden of being short and nifty.

But what is a poet if not an anachronism?

a creature lost among  capitalist feeders

and accused of practicing onanism,

irrelevant,  being at best a loss leader

a prestige item with a hushed voice

on NPR, bloodless and choice. 

In other words, a downer. In other words, a monster.

so you see how much it’s in my line

to stir your shade, to disinter

you from the vaults of the gothic sublime

as you predominate in the culture

that has turned away from the bigwigs of literature.

You’ve had a husband. I’ve had too.

Why do we burn ourselves in the futile quest

to find a mate who is not askew

and will live and love beyond time’s test?

Yours,  his heart consumed in a barbecue

and mine, who I would have liked to have done the same to.

But you are thinking, you woke me up for this?

Couldn’t you bitch to some living friend?

I have other fans, who follow their bliss

by dreaming up quasi-pornographic ends

for me and my creature, a jumble anatomy

all cooked up for fan-fic fuckery.

I dig your objection, or my projection

(shades and shadows, death and the double)

girl – aren’t we the girls who’ve made

our project to cause a lot of trouble

to nitpickers, naggers, and no-nothing butts

who tend to write letters addressed: stupid sluts?

But I have a reason – here we come

Into, technically, the finis of this discourse

this insinuato – for unlike some

I’m keen on rhetorical resource

You, who learned the ancient Latin and Greek

will recognize of what I speak -

Okay, enough, incipit the story:

A friend who is always discovering the bizarre-est

Paris, Fragonard’s ecorchés,

or  sketches by some necrophile symbolist

invited me to the Hôpital St. Louis

where plaster casts from the nineteenth century

are exhibited to the select who ask

for tickets, a dwindling group it seems.

Physicians in training once had the task

of noting horrors that appear as though in dreams

of the worst that can happen to the human skin:

the 19^th century payment for each sin.

The crowding, hovels, debauchery and then some:

Hence the lesion-ridden penis, tumerous nose

adenomas, sarcomas, in a waxy gum

painted then and signed – it’s art I suppose

from which I’m sure that you can learn a bunch

by peering closely – just ask Edvard Munch.

The painter visited here, with some acquaintance

In the 1890s, when  nihilism was the rage

and then painted The Inheritance

where a syphilitic child lies like an open page

on his mother’s lap, diseased to the bone

- it obviously fed Munch’s  misogynistic jones.

The modern Prometheus – we never got it right

did we? In each vitrine a tragedy

 beauty and labeled deformity fight

out the issue of  transcendent agony -

limits imposed by the messes we are

and get into, on this tiny star.

This agony, it isn’t romantic

- these casts do not display the noble body parts

that went into the making of your maniac

a monster science born of the modern arts

mixed with the superstitious  – that was clever!

But these diseases are of another weather.

Frankenstein’s head – via James Whale –

would fit right in here: green skin, thick brow,

forehead scar, the morphine user’s pale

eyelids.

               How

the doctors and the casters would have loved to see

Frankenstein in the clinic for an advisory!

Did you approve from your heavenly perch

The cinematic annexing of your IP?

I’m sure you recognized in the monster’s lurch

through that landscape your demi-divinity

- “so dusk, so obscene and blind”

this untrammeled product of the human mind.  

  

Myself, my head would not fit here

- my fault is beyond this wax, God’s truth -

though I’ve seen diagrams that make clear

that the HOX proteins have failed to induce

the inhibition process that would lend opacity

– undermining the bod’s ombragenous capacity.

Yes, I’m the girl with no shadow. You missed

a subject so subdued to your dyer’s art,

no shadowless girl in some dying fire hissed

its matter into your gothic heart.

A monster me –  and not a faker

writing lit’s greatest monstermaker!

I’ll wrap this up – it has grown quite a size

- just I thought the scene of me here was for you.

I’m sure it has given you a surprise

that out of all of Percy’s crew

You are the studied, the referenced celebrity:

Quite up there with Byron, Keats and Percy.

My friend and I left the hospital grounds

and went for coffee to dissipate

the horrors that made their circus rounds

in my dreams, which I won’t relate:

it’s morning here, time to work, and so

sincerely, Karen Chamisso.