The thing about being back in college in your fifties is that subjects you once avoided like a disease are suddenly not only doable, but enjoyable. A former numberphobe, I nailed my History of Math course with an ‘A’ without an ulcer or tantrums or even swearing. Now I’m taking on poetry, a writing discipline I’m most familiar with from a 6th grade dissection of The Road Not Taken, a trampling through the Romantics in high school, and an occasional haiku on a box of Celestial Seasonings tea. So imagine my surprise when I immersed myself in the interpretation of contemporary American poetry and discovered it is actually a kick.
It helps that the period I’m working with includes the Beat poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Ground-breaking, ground-shaking stuff. It was the poets who influenced the songwriters who really affected mainstream culture, artists like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Poetry readings in the coffeehouses of New York and San Francisco in the fifties helped create the environment of personal reflection, social awareness, and protest that would explode in the next decade. In addition to which many of the poems address the same issues we struggle with today, like the lightning passage of time, and the desire to leave our mark before the journey ends.
It isn’t only the middle-aged population that wrestles with the specter of aging. A few months ago, 28-year-old Daughter observed on a subway platform at the Hunter College stop that she was the oldest one in sight. In telling me this, her voice was edged with rueful amazement. Son also remarked recently that the past couple of years had gone by at a much more rapid pace than when he was young. He’s 26.
Here then is a lovely poem by Donald Justice straight from my poetry text. It speaks to what we’ve just been speaking of, and it won’t hurt you at all to read. Unlike the upcoming paper I’m writing on Sylvia Plath, which would probably have us all putting our heads in the oven like she did.
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.
Daughter’s Featured Fotos mean whatever you want them to
crossed lines
bogart!
cruise ship collection
