The Millennial Pedestrian

Back in Providence

Writing poems on a bike tour is just something I’m incapable of. Too busy admiring the countryside during the day and way too busy eating and drinking at the end of the day.  So there’s no new stuff for TMP right now, although a few ideas occurred to me while pedaling oh-so-slowly beside the Danube and later on, the Vltava rivers. They may pop up in later postings.

Meanwhile, I thought I’d treat you to another selection from 100 Essential Modern Poems (ed. Joseph Parisi). This is Donald Justice’s wonderful poem, “Men at Forty.” I first read it when I was at least 55, just starting to write and study poetry. It is still one of my models for how a poem should read, connect, and be constructed. And I can tell you that you can be 55 (or older) and still feel the poem reaching into you. Read it aloud at least a couple of times – you’ll see that Justice does so much with very few words. The first stanza alone could be a poem all by itself, haunting and memorable and complete.  

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 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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 9th, 2006.
It's part of the Prose category.
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