Arrival
“I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never…” —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
There are many ways to be born, though I
have forgotten most. This is a story about hands: how I have
only this blue body, this terrible body, this murdered
self. A face blue like overripe stars, like pigeons. I want the
ending to be bright. Inside a forest, a place so green & so lovely
it could burn you. This is a story about burning &
being burned. I will give you bellflower root, mugwort, the
skin of my waiting mouth, my tongue still helpless,
noiseless against the rain. Here is my body & here is what I
can give you. I am only what I sing, a stretched shirt, the stale half
of a bread roll. Just a little music as the birds unfurl, strangled
into song. What can I give you that will make you stay? The
song looped over, the other half of the bread roll. Something innocent,
soft. Something that has known warmth & swallowed it. The body as
a measure of everything but itself. The birds as they
continue to sing. A beat of quiet for the flickering rain, for ruin slipped
under pillowcases. This is a story about hands &
everything they cannot touch. The only ending I know: grasped
mouths & blue palms & the sound of a forest burning into
silence. Here is what’s left. Here is my body, death
-less & waiting & so cold. Look, all I have is this—
a face nothing like yours, your voice still scratching at my throat.
Here is my body & the way it has forgotten who
-leness. Here is my body. This is a story about how it never
starts.
Analytic Component:
“Arrival” is a Golden Shovel poem that reanimates the relationship between Victor Frankenstein and his monster, between creator and the created. In it, the poetic speaker echoes the monster’s feelings of self-doubt in a world that rejects him for his body, his nature, his “murdered / self.” I was largely inspired by the ending of the novel—specifically, the monster’s final speech before disappearing, in which he admits his misery, his wretched self: “I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing” (Shelley 211).
I decided to use poetic form to guide my understanding of the character of the monster himself, ultimately writing “Arrival” as a Golden Shovel poem. The Golden Shovel is a form of contemporary poetry that builds bodies of work from the bones up. Originated by Terrance Hayes in response to a work by Gwendolyn Brooks, the last word of every line of a Golden Shovel poem is a poem itself, taken from an excerpt or the whole of a separate poem. In this process of literary alchemy, words and phrases from the original poem are reanimated in new contexts and made alive, much like the monster created by Frankenstein. As a result, the poem’s subject matter is reflected in its form.
“Arrival” takes an excerpt from the monster’s final speech—beginning, “I have murdered the lovely and the helpless”—and reanimates it, with the monster’s humanity reconsidered in the context of his actions. While the monster towards the novel’s ending has renounced his humanity in committing to the act of murder, the monster in my poem is a more sympathetic character who wants only to know warmth, to know what it feels like to resemble another person, to have a body be acknowledged for what it is. Instead, all he has is this: “a face nothing like yours, your voice still scratching at my throat.” His rapt attention to nature—”a forest, a place so green & so lovely…[t]he birds as they continue to sing”—reflects his desire to assimilate into the world of the living.
My adaptation of the monster thus focuses more on his humanity than his inherent monstrosity: “What can I give that will make you stay?” Despite this new characterization, he falls victim to the same societal rejection that his novel counterpart does. Through no action of his own, his story is sealed with a fixed ending: “Here is my body. This is a story about how it never / starts.” Ultimately, the monster presented in my poem is stripped of the chance to be born, his story instead ending before it ever began.