Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I’m writing today with a gray and black dog snoring at my feet. When our terrier Finn became a part of our family, I wasn’t ready to welcome him. Several weeks after moving to Nashville, I had to return to Vermont to tie up a few loose ends. While I was away, Buzz, our elderly golden retriever, had to be put down—dear Buzz, who gazed at us as if we all walked with a thick nimbus of gold light around our heads. I justified my absence with… flimsy reasoning.

So my wife went to the rescue shelter without telling me. I happened to FaceTime while she was sitting down on the floor with a scraggly four-month-old puppy between her legs. Guess what? Look! Isn’t he cute? she said. With my guilt of not being there, and her alone in a new city for at least several more weeks, I couldn’t say no.

By the time I arrived back to Nashville, they had a serious bonding thing going. He slept in our bed. Even in the days of Buzz, I avoided turning our bedroom into Noah’s ark. I insisted on a dog crate. Thus began a month-long argument between me and my wife. Finn had a habit of digging where I lay as though searching for, I don’t know, a bunch of treats sewn into the mattress? His intense burrowing as well as his claws were terrifying. We argued and I won.

But then, one evening, I accidentally did not latch the crate securely, and I woke up the next morning with Finn stretched across my leg, snoozing away. When I stirred, he galloped up and gave me the sloppiest of kisses. When I left the bed to make coffee, he jumped down and walked beside me. For the whole morning, he trailed me like . . . like Buzz used to do. I realized I was holding back my love. I brought my wife a cup of coffee, with Finn, at my feet. I apologized for not welcoming our new pet; told her I was wrong to leave her during the holidays.

Today’s poem exquisitely models one of my new and favorite acts of speech, that moment when we hold ourselves accountable for our mishaps and make amends — which feels like taking time to grow.

I Was Wrong about So Much
by Eugenia Leigh

About my brain, its wires glitching 
like a jellyfish sprite

flashing its apple-red tentacles 
above my countless thunderclouds.

About your eyes, not a savior’s eyes 
but brown as blood. I was wrong

about the God I warped 
into a weapon, a garrison.

Wrong about love, too. I thought love 
was my mother’s soprano tessitura

screaming. I thought love was
a violence. Verdi’s requiem, Dies irae.

You thought love
was love. New millennium emo. February

flooding the school below the palms 
wringing their palms

like willows the morning after
you rinsed gas station zin from my hair.

I’m sorry I chased you for years 
the way a cowbird tails the cow—

not for love of the beast,
but for the insects it kicks up.

She ditches her eggs
in someone else’s nests

to do this. Kills someone else’s young 
to do this. This possessed. I was.

“I Was Wrong About So Much” by Eugenia Leigh from BIANCA © 2023 Eugenia Leigh. Used by permission of Four Way Books.