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Days of '74

By Mark Jarman b. 1952 Mark Jarman

What was the future then but affirmation,

The first yes between us

Followed by the first lingering dawn?

Waking below a window shaded by redwoods

(Waking? We hadn’t slept—),

We found time saved, like sunlight in a tree.

Still, the house was cold, and there were shadows.

The couple in the next room

Rapped the wall to quiet us, like them,

Condescending from a bitter knowledge

That, young as we all were,

Love didn’t last, but receded into silence.

Wedging our pillows back of the headboard

That clapped in time with us,

We let them think we agreed. Then, holding on,

We closed each other’s mouths and felt that slowness

That the best days begin with

Turn into the speed with which they fly.

Flight was that year’s theme, all around us—

Flight of hunter and hunted,

The President turning inward on one wing,

And, on the patio, the emigration

Of termites, a glittering fleet,

Leaving that shadowed house a little lighter.

Within it all, above it, or beyond,

We thought we were the fixed point,

And held still as the quail lit down beside us

And waited for her plump mate to appear,

His crest a quivering hook.

The valley’s reach of sunshine reeled them in.

There was wilderness around us, don’t forget.

Behind the nets of fragrance

Thrown across our path by the acacia

Lurked the green man or the kidnapper.

And there was the Pacific

With its own passions taking place as rain.

The sorrow of the couple in the next room

Was a deep muteness nightly.

That loneliness could come of loving was

Like news of time cored out of the redwood.

The house that we made shake,

Or thought we did, was taking wing already.

After we left, still it took us years

Before we stopped comparing

Every morning together to that first one

And every place we lived to that first place

And everything we said

To that first word repeated all night long.

Mark Jarman, "Days of '74" from The Black Riviera. Copyright © 1990 by Mark Jarman. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress.

Source: Poetry (February 1988).

Biography

Considered a key figure in both New Narrative and New Formalism, Mark Jarman has exerted a significant influence on contemporary American poetry. In the 1980s, with Robert McDowell, Jarman founded and edited the Reaper, a magazine devoted to reclaiming and promoting poetry that emphasized story and image. Controversially warning "Navel gazers and mannerists” that “their time is running out,” the magazine sought to reestablish . . .

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