Free Becoming Light by Erica Jong Page A

you
    is more
    & less
    than love.
    2 / Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin & Mary Godwin Shelley
    She was “lonesome
    as a Crusoe,”
    orphaned by childbirth,
    orphaned being born,
    killing her mother
    with a stubborn afterbirth—
    the medium they’d shared….
    Puppies were brought
    to draw off Mary’s milk,
    & baby Mary screamed.
    She grew up
    to marry Shelley,
    have four babes
    (of whom three died)—
    & one immortal monster.
    Byron & Shelley
    strutted near the lake
    & wrote their poems
    on purest alpine air.
    The women had their pregnancies
    & fears.
    They bore the babies,
    copied manuscripts,
    & listened to the talk
    that love was “free.”
    The brotherhood of man
    did not apply:
    all they contributed
    to life
    was life.
    & Doctor Frankenstein
    was punished
    for his pride:
    the hubris of a man
    creating life.
    He reared a wretched
    animated corpse—
    & Shelley praised the book
    but missed the point.
    Who were these gothic monsters?
    Merely men.
    Self-exiled Byron
    with his Mistress Fame,
    & Percy Shelley
    with his brains aboil,
    the seaman
    who had never learned to swim.
    Dear Marys,
    it was clear
    that you were truer.
    Daughters of daughters,
    mothers of future mothers,
    you sought to soar
    beyond complaints
    of woman’s lot—
    & died in childbirth
    for the Rights of Man.
    3 / Exiles
    This was the sharpness
    of my mother’s lesson.
    Being a woman
    meant eternal strife.
    No colored wool could stitch
    the trouble up;
    no needlepoint
    could cover it with flowers.
    When Byron played
    the exiled wanderer,
    he left his ladies
    pregnant or in ruin.
    He left his children
    fatherless for fame,
    then wrote great letters
    theorizing pain.
    He scarcely knew
    his daughters any more
    than Mary knew the Mary
    who expired giving her birth.
    All that remained in him:
    a hollow loneliness
    about the heart,
    the milkless tug of memory,
    the singleness of creatures
    who breath air.
    Birth is the start
    of loneliness
    & loneliness the start
    of poetry:
    that seems a crude
    reduction of it all,
    but truth
    is often crude.
    & so I dream
    of daughters
    as a man might dream
    of giving birth,
    & as my mother dreamed
    of daughters
    & had three—
    none of them her dream.
    & I reach out for love
    to other women
    while my real mother
    pines for me
    & I pine for her,
    knowing I would have to be
    smaller than a needle
    pierced with wool
    to pierce the canvas of her life
    again.
    4 / Dear Daughter
    Will you change all this
    by my having you,
    & by your having everything—
    Don Juan’s exuberance,
    Childe Harold’s pilgrimage,
    books & babies,
    recipes & riots?
    Probably not.
    In making daughters
    there is so much needlepoint,
    so much doing & undoing,
    so much yearning—
    that the finished pattern cannot please.
    My poems will have daughters
    everywhere,
    but my own daughter
    will have to grow
    into her energy.
    I will not call her Mary
    or Erica.
    She will shape
    a wholly separate name.
    & if her finger falters
    on the needle,
    & if she ever needs to say
    she hates me,
    & if she loathes poetry
    & loves to whistle,
    & if she never
    calls me Mother,
    She will always be my daughter—
    my filament of soul
    that flew,
    & caught.
    She will come
    in a radiance of new-made skin,
    in a room of dying men
    and dying flowers,
    in the shadow of her large mother,
    with her books propped up
    & her ink-stained fingers,
    lying back on pillows
    white as blank pages,
    laughing—
    “I did it without
    words!”

Elegy for a Whale
    Francis, the only pregnant white whale in captivity, died last night of internal poisoning in her tank at the New York Aquarium at Coney Island….
    —The New York Times, May 26, 1974
    Too big & too intelligent
    to reproduce,
    the ferns will outlast us,
    not needing each other
    with their dark spores,
    & the cockroaches
    with their millions of egg-cases,
    & even the one-celled waltzers
    dancing pseudopod to pseudopod,
    but we are too big, too smart
    to stick around.
    Floating in Coney Island,
    floating on her white belly—
    while the