August 6, 2009

Something That Is Like the Twilight Sound of the Crickets

I won’t be forty for a long time still, but there are some new grey hairs popping up more frequently around my temples. When my daughter told me this morning that she wanted to watch me shave, I couldn’t help but think of Donald Justice’s “Men at Forty,” and his image of a father’s face “still warm with the mystery of lather.” That poem is brilliant and devastating. He names the condition that I feel already, of men who are “more fathers than sons themselves now.” And he also has what I find to be a remarkable articulation of the way my mortality is a current I have to negotiate mostly subconsciously but almost continuously. He says that:

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

Though he doesn’t name “it” explicitly, I think he’s talking about Mortality. And it is gentle because it is subtle. And it is a swell because gradual as it is, its presence is unmistakable.

Despite its darkness, this poem anchors me. Being a father is the best antidote I’ve found for the grief of losing my own father. And there is so much of his face to find in the mirror, so much more for sharing the role I now play as parent – even in his absence – with him.

2 comments:

  1. I am a woman, not a mother, with my mother still alive, and I am still moved by these words.

    I feel the movement, that gentle swell. The clock ticking, aging, etc.

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