But before that was told she could not nurse

her infant daughter for fear the corruption

would spread through her milk, though she stayed

at Mary’s bedside the final three days of her life.

And Godwin stayed beside her, who, because he loved

his wife, believed her genius could survive

any truth, and so published a memoir later

detailing everything: Wollstonecraft’s affairs,

her daughter’s illegitimacy, her attempts at suicide—so that

in 1798 the index of the Anti-Jacobin Review would publish,

under the heading “Prostitution,” See Mary

Wollstonecraft. Two towns over from his Madonna,

in a church in Arezzo, Piero della Francesca

painted a fresco of Mary Magdalene, her curled hair wet

with the tears she used to bathe Christ’s feet,

her body a swollen green swathe of dress, the red cape

folded to accentuate the pendulous belly

and thick thigh, the Magdalene bristling

between arch columns that frame her, one

painted slightly forward, the other behind

her body, so that we do not know in which direction

Mary is headed, nor what she is, really,

her almond eyes glittering out at us, her halo chipped,

over centuries, away. It is wonderful

when time accentuates something of the truth

already within us: the frank look, the unabashed

leg with which the woman kicks off the covers from the bed

of the man to whom she is not married; the neat,

round muscle of his shoulder pressed against hers

in the dark, his body over and over coming alive

under her hands, a dream or a nightmare

Mary Shelley once had of Clara.

All this time, she told her husband, their daughter

had not been dead at all, only cold, the little body frozen

and waiting to be attended to. And so we rubbed

it before the fire, and now it lives, she told

Shelley in the conversation recorded

in her journal, and cried awhile, and went to bed.

Then woke again the next morning, and remembered.

The midwife, walking back down from the villa

three summers later, having attended the birth

of the duke’s new, less delicate wife, hums a song

to herself that she hummed to the baby

she just left, a girl this time, no pomegranates

for payment; a girl who will, if lucky, inherit

her mother’s strength and her plainness, both traits

the midwife believes might protect her from

and in the birthing bed. She’ll grow up,

the midwife thinks, and marry, and have children

herself, some less or more like her, sons

with obdurate natures, perhaps, or a daughter

who inherits her curly hair, perhaps the sturdy thighs

of a woman like this shopkeeper kneeling now by a store

in the Piazza Grande to retrieve a shower of euros

from someone’s coin purse. The woman stands, straightens,

and I see her mouth thin to a not unpleasant line

as she looks out at me, calculating, perhaps,

the time until lunch as she tugs at the waist