by Donald
Justice
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 practices tying
His father’s
tie there in secret,
And the
face of that 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.
Justice (1925-2004)
won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1980. He wrote this poem in 1967. Know
next to nothing about him; might check out his work. Then again, might not, as
the poem above, though sounding some tones with me, is of a pitch too bleak for
me, as my sonar attempts to navigate this existential leitmotif which fills the
woods behind my own mortgaged house.
