The Lepidopterist's Wife

The Lepidopterist’s Wife

He’s up there every evening quietly
pinning his brightly-coloured specimens
to cardboard, their paper wings as fragile
as love, the life gone out of them, no more
than ornaments annotated with dates
on which he trapped them in his net, or where.

I sit beside a photograph of us
on our wedding day, me in my cabbage
white lace dress, ready to flutter around
his bleak, ominous light. I never thought
that it would come to this. I never thought
that I would be the one who would creep out

to meet the man next door who reeks of gin
and loss, who watches horse racing all day
on a wide screen, a penniless mischief
who gives away whatever it might be
that he might have- and some of it to me-
then lets me return back into the night.