into the soak dike, splitting the wood wheel

in two, and by the time the woman could walk

the steep hill up to the villa, the mother had torn,

and in the rush to save her, no one worked

quick enough to cut the cord wrapped

around the baby’s throat. Or the baby came out

strong and fine, but died two years later

when it stumbled into a fire, or was bitten by a rat

and sickened and starved, or caught the fever

that spread through town when all the animals

were stabled inside the houses for winter.

So many people died, so many people

were supposed to die, it’s hard to conceive

of how the mothers survived their grief,

and how they named their next, living baby

after the dead one because the name, at least,

was good. It’s hard to know whether I should read

the deepest grief or resignation or both in the line

from Mary Shelley’s 1818 notebook, the year

her daughter, Clara, died, two weeks

after Mary had given birth to her. Woke this morning.

Found my baby dead, all the little black scratching pen

could add to paper, and the rest was blank,

and then there were months, and then

there was Frankenstein. Piero della Francesca

painted an embroidery of pomegranates

into Mary’s birthing tent, symbol of fruitfulness

and the underworld, of a mother’s grief

and of her rage to get her child back, the daughter

both dead and alive to her, as Mary knows her own child

is both dead and alive to us. A winter fruit

for the winter birth of a rich woman

whose house wanted to ward off a grueling

delivery, and so whose midwife would feed her

pomegranate seeds to sustain her, a fruit

the midwife herself would eat only once, as payment

from the duke for the son she finally ushered

into the world for him. Such a strange, leathery

skin, though the color was bright

as blood on fresh linen, and who could have expected

those glistening cells packed inside, wet prisms

in the ruby eye of a ruby insect, or the heart

of a god who takes what he wants

and never gives it back. The midwife took the fruit home

and split it with her husband and tried not to think

of the bed of the girl she’d just left, its stains

that looked almost black in the dawn light,

and how the girl’s skin had turned bluish, the fragile spring

she’d require to spend alone in bed away from the duke

and healing. How can Mary not look

downcast before these curtains that threaten

to close on her, to open? I have no doubt

of seeing the animal today, Mary Wollstonecraft

Godwin, Mary Shelley’s mother, wrote,

meaning birth, meaning Mary, the little animal

she never saw grow up, because Wollstonecraft

died of an infection days after giving birth.