Men at Forty

I am looking at forty in a few months. I am not too scared of it... yet. Here is a great poem I first read in John Irving's novel The Hotel New Hampshire. It is called 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.

The most powerful part of this poem for me is the first part. It says so much about straddling the line of life.

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

What doors will I not be coming back to? Am I closing them softly as not to draw attention to the closure that it signifies? Kind of fucking depressing, isn't it?

I take inspiration from Irving's character Frank in his novel. His younger brother sent him a copy of this poem on Frank's fortieth birthday. Frank did not read past the first four lines.

Frank fired me back a note saying he stopped reading the damn poem right there. "Close your own doors!" Frank snapped. "You'll be forty soon enough. As for me, I bang the damn doors and come back to them all the fucking time."