Poem: Men at Forty
I first heard this poem in Garrison Keillor’s soothing lilt about a month ago or so on The Writer’s Almanac. Then it came to me today in an email. I turn forty this year, so what the heck.
“Men at Forty”
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.
And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practises tying
His father’s tie there in secret
And the face of the father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something
That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.
– Donald Justice
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