The Travelled Road

Poems by Mark Jarman

I. The Children
The children are hiding among the raspberry canes.
They look big to one another, the garden small.
Already in their mouths this soft fruit
That lasts so briefly in the supermarket
Tastes like the past. The gritty wall,
Behind the veil of leaves, is hollow.
There are yellow wasps inside it. The children know.
They know the wall is hard, although it hums.
They know a lot and will not forget it soon.
When did we forget? But we were never
Children, never found where they were hiding
And hid with them, never followed
The wasp down into its nest
With a fingertip that still tingles.
We lie in bed at night, thinking about
The future, always the future, always forgetting
That it will be the past, hard and hollow,
Veiled and humming, soon enough.

II. After Disappointment
To lie in your child’s bed when she is gone
Is calming as anything I know. To fall
Asleep, is to admit that you have never been
So tired, so enchanted by the spell
Of your grown body. To feel small instead
Of blocking out the light, to feel alone,
Not knowing what you should or shouldn’t feel,
Is to find out, no matter what you’ve said
About the cramped escapes and obstacles
You plan and face and have to call the world,
That there remain these places, occupied
By children, yours if lucky, like the girl
Who finds you here and lies down by your side.

III. The Secret Ocean
When you were little girls, I brought you here
To light weaving on water among trees,
With one of you beside me, walking along,
The other on my shoulders, talking to herself.
We found this place beside a baseball field
In a flood plane flooded by meadowlarks.
We pitched our half-hour camp.
A speckled dancing
Took place upon the wavelets and the air,
A water strider sort of dance, a shifting
Greened by the leaves like lenses overhead.
I think I named it after one of you,
Claire’s Secret Ocean, Zoe’s Secret Sea,
Far from the actual oceans you’d not seen yet.
Neither of you knew that we were there
To calm and change the color of my thought,
To ease its glaring pressure for a moment.
And we have been together other places
For the same reason, which I can now reveal—
There have been times I thought my head would crack,
Only to have you both demand ice cream.
It’s been a long time since we’ve walked together
For reasons you didn’t have to understand.
If you were younger, I wouldn’t be less fearful,
Now that the monster shadowing you is not
The wounded ego of your harmless father,
But something that would harm you if it could.
I think of that first, stunned day
Outside of Eden, going through the motions— No—learning motions no one had yet dreamed of.
And menace, like a new electric nimbus,
Surrounding everything, invisibly. And no one to walk with but each other.
And yet it could be that these private walks
To places like the secret ocean, trailing
Beside a darkened, mute, distracted parent,
Were preparations for new valleys of the shadow,
Fearing no evil, because someone was with you.