I feel as if my birthday preparations have been going on for the better part of a month. My wife threw me a surprise party on May 5; my friends who follow the Hebrew calendar honored my birthday on the 12th of Iyar, which this year happened to be April 30. But I will indeed be forty in the eyes of most folks in the Gregorian tradition next Tuesday, May 22.
So of course, there is no other possible poem to put up this week but Donald Justice’s classic. My own father was alive at my last birthday. I reach my fortieth without him, and the grief that comes with that realization is powerful.
But as I’ve posted before, thank God above for the strength to close doors.
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.
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