You Might Just Get It

Cacoethes is the impulse to do bad things. Not evil or psychopathic things, just slightly off and knowingly wrong things. My wife is prone to it because she was so very good as a child. When we were dating, my friends and family invariably remarked to me that Anita is really nice. I thought so too. When I passed this compliment on, she was aggrieved. She took “nice” to be a euphemism for boring, conformist, bland, prim, a little goody two-shoes with no character. She’d rather people think her mean.

Our courtship followed a familiar pattern. We lived in different cities, so initially our communication was by email. I fell into the old habit of seeking to seduce with poetry and succeeded in seducing myself. She inspired in me the capacity to see the universe in a grain of sand, to walk in beauty like the night. With eyes of an enchantress, voice smooth as liqueur, she played me in the evenings with boogie woogie prestidigitation. It was a dance that lasted that whole brutal summer.

I will undress you from the heat, I wrote.

Water, lime, a sprig of mint,

Ice in moons, a serenade

On throat, on arms,

In breasts' deep shade,

Your skin, a glass harmonium,

Played with ice until you hum.

A moon of ice for each eye, dreaming;

A moon of ice for your navel, shivering;

A moon of ice for each nipple, standing;

My hands move slow as a glacier.

When I take you in my arms, I wrote,

And quicken you with naked palms,

The goose and quiver of your skin

Create a porous opening

Where the soul breathes out and in.

My fingers worship, my body serves

This mystery of vibrant nerves,

Moving centre of my universe.

Be careful what you wish for, she said. You might just get it.

The poetry worked. We moved in together. The writing stopped. We were absorbed in getting to know each other’s dreams, desires, fears, families, habits and histories. We were securing our future with well laid plans. We entwined like strangler figs around a common purpose.

I am cacoethic too. Not from being an excessively good child, though that played a part, but from admiring my older brother, who was so good at being bad. I wanted to have his striking social identity. My basic problem is that I lack an endogenous sense of my own identity. I search frantically in the mirror of others for glimpses of myself and find only fragments and contradictions. When I’m good, all I see is the beaming indifference of smiles.

My wife is an artist and therefore essentially selfish. I have come to appreciate that she isn’t nice. She makes me face up to myself. Becoming me is not a given but a task. The poet’s task is to create a prism through which to transfigure the world. My task is to discover the prism that I am.

William McDonald

Right Left Write’s August genre prompt was Poetry, in celebration of national Poetry Month.

Find out more about Right Left Write and submit to the September competition (genre prompt: Suspense) at www.queenslandwriters.org.au/rightleftwrite.

August 2023: You Might Just Get It - William McDonald