![]() In its few-year life-span, a ladybug will eat five thousand insects. Centuries ago, farmers in Europe said the Madonna’s name when aphids overtook their crops and they repeated her name when shiny, red-backed, seven-spotted beetles offered salvation. With recovery, naming is the first prayer. I have changed Mauricio’s name, but I don’t want to. This is how I start hearing about “Mauricio” from Revere, Massa-chusetts, the speaker at Spiritually Speaking. It was the first time I had thought of my husband as an addict. My therapist recently said addicts don’t take accountability for their actions. Do I think so little of him? Will he never be enough in my eyes? He knows that I am compassionate, a lapsed Catholic, and a perfectionist: guilt is easy to implant. He will tell me I’m arrogant and self-righteous. ![]() He will tell me that I’m persecuting him. That’s he’s more cogent than he’s ever been. He will tell me that he has more of a spiritual life than he’s ever had. At first I’ll say, is everything okay? Are you feeling all right? Then he will get angry. He gets lost in a rant or a morose sermon, and I accuse him. Guilty for being unable to say what I want and guilty for being uninterested and guilty because I know what happens when he’s like thispausey, overwrought, slow. ![]() I send every signal I can that I want to get back to my notebook, without explicitly saying so. I want to say it’s not okay, and I can’t. (Is he drunk here?) I wonder, eyeing my notebook. Slowly, he says, I wanted to hear if it sounds like waves. He has read the poem three times, he admits, pawing the words. I read, enunciating clearly, through the final line. The poem I start to read is about a child drowning. The spine is worn with narrow gray couloirs. I take the paperback without touching him. Read a poem to me?Īnother James Wright from Saint Judas. He is sitting up at the foot of the bed, still in jeans. There’s a lightening in my chest that comes whenever my pencil hovers over paper, where I can write and life feels paused, untouched by alcoholism, even if I’m writing about an alcoholic, when I realize my husband is looking at me. I am undressed, down to my soft black underthings. I have just slid under the comforter with my notebook. Brown puppy, gray bunny, white ponyI picture the puffy plastic animals on the mobile, coming to stillness over his crib. Over the hum of The Incredible Heat Machine, the last notes of my son’s mobile decrescendo. The last owner of the house left an old radiator on wheels (“The Incredible Heat Machine,” it says in jaunty Schoolhouse Rock font), which we run at 1500V to warm up the space. It’s an attic, shoddily converted with piecemeal flooring and ugly office-park sconces. I focus on the bookshelf, where three ladybugs play dead. Even if I give my husband the benefit of the doubtmaybe he is merely moved by the poetryI suspect he is drunk. I hold my son close when he nurses, as if we are two passengers on a life raft. Slurring, slur, first a nounthin, fluid dirtthen a verb: smeared, smirched, disparaged. Now, as he reads of a dog enduring a storm of midges, his voice hucks in his throat. The poem about the dog is the second poem my husband reads in the nurseryhe was inordinately, intimately moved by the first. Eyes closed, forehead slick with sweat, he is sleepyhe keeps forgetting to suck, then jolts half-awake: reaches his neck, stretches his throat, and gulps my nipple. My son is lying across my lap, lips soft on my breast. In the poem, a dog crosses fallow fields. My husband says this kind of rhyme is a rarity, but I am wary of rhyme’s insect-buzz in my ear. Remarkable? These are rhyming poems, before Wright renounced rhyme. Wright disavowed this book, which is unfathomable to my husbandhe has been reading this book, and it is remarkable, he believes. The poem is in Saint Judas, James Wright’s second book. In the nursery, my husband reads a poem from the perspective of a dog. Running to spare his suffering, I forgot / My name, my number, how my days began
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