Your Secret Life
(for Jessie)     

I can see it all already:
sitting up long after the kiwi
and cat have gone to bed
to do whatever it is they do
when the screen scrambles to noisy snow.

I’ll hear you shut the front door
with a soft click that makes me jump –
just time to fix a welcoming smile
before you bound into the kitchen (perhaps
for a drink) blooming with your secret life.

What shall we say? Will I blurt out,
“Do you know what time it is!”,
angry with relief that you’re home
at last and apparently unharmed
from that film, that party, that lover?

Would that be better or more likely
than a ‘Had a nice time, sweetheart?’,
poured out with an oh-so-casual cup of tea?
‘Sorry, Dad.’ ‘Yes, Dad.’ Not now, not soon,
but sometime it will happen.

Harry Ricketts
First published in Coming Here (Nagare Press, 1989)

I wrote ‘Your Secret Life’ one Sunday afternoon in late 1986. I was sitting at my desk, on one side a line of roll-up cigarettes, on the other a half-drunk cup of coffee. I was making notes for a first-year poetry lecture which would include two of my favourite Fleur Adcock’s poems, ‘For Andrew’ and ‘For a Five-Year-Old’. I could vaguely hear my six-year-old daughter Jessie and four-year-old son Jamie outside on the trampoline. They sounded happy.

Above the first Adcock poem, I scribbled ‘self-deflating’ and alongside the second ‘rhyme’, ‘shape’, ‘tone’: hooks that might help with the lecture. I started thinking about the effect of the delayed rhyme in ‘For a Five-Year-Old’, the quiet pulse of the iambic pentameters before the shortened eighth line, the apparently easy conversational tone, the admission of past acts, unkindnesses, betrayals, the raised eyebrow (amused? wry? rueful?) at the conclusion: ‘But that is how things are: I am your mother, / and we are kind to snails.’

I thought about the son reflecting back to the mother a trusting version of herself, which gives her pause. This pause, I saw, was the poem. My mind bumped to an early scene in Edge of Darkness, an apocalyptic TV series I’d been avidly watching. The camera pans slowly round a student bedroom as a policeman goes through his dead daughter’s possessions, pauses as he looks numbly at her things. These two pauses fused in my mind. I thought of Jessie outside on the trampoline. I imagined her as a teenager. I’d be in the kitchen, waiting up for her. It would be late. She would be late. I’d hear the front door click. She would come in; the phrase ‘blooming with your secret life’ jumped into my head. I jotted down phrases, bits of imagined dialogue, a possible ending: ‘Not now, not soon, / but sometime it will happen.’ The poem seemed, half-involuntarily, to write itself, and I felt (really for the first time) that it sounded like me.

Soon afterwards at a reading, I’d usually open with ‘Your Secret Life’. It seemed to strike a chord. I still often begin with it. But, for me, the poem has long taken on quite a different meaning. Within five years, my marriage had broken up, and Jessie and I lived in different hemispheres. That imagined late-night encounter happened only in the poem, never in real life. Instead, I’d receive bulletins on the phone (the previous night for her, the following morning for me). Sometimes the line wobbled with echoes; sometimes it was clear as a bell, and I wrote poems about those heart-turning calls.

Harry Ricketts lives in Wellington. He is a poet, biographer, essayist, editor, anthologist and literary scholar and has published 34 books, most recently First Things: A Memoir (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024). His thirteenth collection of poems, Bonfires on the Ice (Te Herenga Waka University Press), will appear in November.