Men at Sixty: Ready for the Poetry of Donald Justice

When Garrison Keillor read Donald Justice's poem "Men at Forty" on the radio, I went straight to the nearest bookstore to buy Justice's New and Selected Poems. This was back when Keillor, radio, and neighborhood bookstores were all still "a thing," so, I guess it was twenty years ago, when I was just the age for Justice's greatest hit to speak directly to me. Other poems in the collection felt more remote. But, on the strength of "Men at Forty," I've kept the book by my bedside all these years, sampling it once in awhile between other books, learning gradually to appreciate his other poems. Now in my sixtieth year, I think I'm ready to relate to Justice.

Here's the quatrain that stopped me in my tracks:

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

Making it general, about all those men in all their houses, Justice allows us to imagine ourselves stopped "on a stair landing." Between floors, as between youth and age, the men feel the solid house moving "like the deck of a ship / Though the swell is gentle."  The men reflect on 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.

The men are "more fathers than sons themselves, now." To here, the poem already evokes memories and, inevitably, feelings of loss. But Justice moves on to "something" that is "filling" the men, "like the twilight sound / Of the crickets, immense...." The nature of that "something" is a little dark, a little scary, but the movement is "gentle" and the sound of crickets at twilight is a delight: something is going to fill the lives of men at forty, and it seems to be something good. What is it? The poem is better for leaving that to imagination. (But I've read books about it. See Richard Rohr, Falling Upward, my blogpost of 7/18/2014).

At sixty-ish, Justice wrote "Invitation to a Ghost" in memory of a contemporary. "I ask you to come back now as you were in youth," he writes, "Confident, eager, and the silver brushed from your temples." He remembers passionate long talks about poetry. Justice also seems to have lost his confidence, begging his late friend, "Come back now and help me with these verses. / Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life." Reading this now with silver on my temples, I, too, envy my twenty - five - year - old self his confidence.

With the self - doubt in age, however, comes recognition that those passionate and confident young men were also pretentious. A bad line, he reminds his ghost friend "could make you wince: we have all seen it." Justice writes in "Early Poems" of his own work, "How fashionably sad those early poems are!" and pictures them as so many suburban homes "on their clipped lawns" with porches where "bored children sprawl / Reading the comics before their parents rise / -- The rhymes, the meters, how they paralyze!" Justice comforts me with the thought that the loss of self - confidence may be the sign of a good thing, outgrowing cocksureness.

As Justice moved on in years, he moved backwards in view, paying tribute to parents, their parents, to his music teachers, and to the places that he lived in Georgia and especially in Florida. Justice's Selected Poems, published when he was 54, recall sensory impressions of homes and farms, long - gone relatives and piano teachers, "First Death," and "Childhood," which he dedicates to Wordsworth, Rilke and other "poets of a mythical childhood."

The one that somehow stays with me most is among the latest poems in the collection. It's "Vague Memory from Childhood," a re-working of images that he'd used for "Sonatina in Yellow" published in 1973. He remembers "Vast far clouds … darkening /At the end of day," birdsong, and aunts' voices through an open window, while he played outside in the dust, "Caught up in a sort of dream / With sticks and twigs pretending," when someone indoors lights a lamp, "Printing a frail gold geometry on the dust." He has captured a memory very specific to him that I feel I've experienced. Like "Men at Forty," there's that impending darkness, but also the pleasure of being in one's own dreamy world, finding life in sticks and dust, alone, yet bathed in familiar voices and the "frail" golden light, muntins of the window criss - crossing to cast a shadow of foreshortened rectangles.

For an epigraph to the collection, he prints three lines, returning to the "Orpheus" myth:

Orpheus, nothing to look forward to, looked back.
They say he sang then, but the song is lost.
At least he had seen once more the beloved back.

"Nothing to look forward to?" My life isn't so bleak at 59. But I enjoy looking back through Donald Justice's eyes, and look forward to appreciating his poems more in years to come.