Men at Forty

 

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.