Ned Balbo

Son of Frankenstein

After James Whale's Frankenstein, 1931

Whose son was I? Strapped down, I woke alone,
face bandaged, lightning flashing through the gauze,
rain-soaked, thunder surrounding me, the noise
of chains and pulleys guiding my descent
from storm and chaos to my father's voice--
I thought he was my father--crying out
in triumph, It's alive! I was an it,
newborn, created thing, though I could think,
almost, too weak to move, my frail hand,
stitched at the wrist, lifting as if to touch
some other who could steady me, but, failing,
fallen at my side. I'd had a name--
What was it? Lost, withheld in convolutions
of a brain--imperfect, criminal--

both mine, and yet, not mine. Who was I then?
Someone expendable, shocked out of sleep
to peer out from a stranger's face, a voice
extinguished by an injured lobe's short circuit...
And so, the weeks passed, locked within a cell
grave-deep beneath the windmill while my father's
labor took its course--I never slept,
he seldom did: dank stone, a hunchback's torch
and torture like the blind rage of a brother
suddenly displaced, lash of the whip
that punished flesh recoiling from fire...
I wanted light--not so much it would burn--
To know, but not so much that I'd shrink back,
repulsed by what I heard; to learn the reason

I was born, or made, or spat from darkness.
I found out most of it--which theft was botched,
what dream destroyed, my own dumb grunts the proof
I wasn't who I should have been--while he
kept talking, certain that I'd never grasp
what crackled in electrodes, or in clouds.
But, Father, you were wrong. I, too, descend
from fathers dead and living; my life, too,
threaded from many lives, belongs to all
whose flesh I wear, and yet, to me alone.
I'm yours, my father's son, and no one's son,
a blank face written off, the unnamed orphan
you'd discard, replace--as if this life,
brief span extended, weren't brief enough.

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