Graham’s “Picnic” is a young girl’s bitter remonstrance of a mother betrayed by a father who is a serial adulterer. The poem’s narrator, about twelve years old, has a compulsive need to retell this story of a picnic, her father’s infidelity, and her mother’s knowledge of it. The picnic begins well
It was a day near the very end of childhood, Rome,
Out in a field, late April, parents, friends,
After a morning’s walk (nearing mid-century),
Some with baskets, some with hats.”
Of course, it ends badly when the girl finds him with another woman.
Unable to do anything about it, the child watches as her mother paints her face like a clown or the girl in Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
See Jorie Graham, “Picnic.” In The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994. New York: HarperCollins, 1995