tuckova

Women at Forty, a revision

tuckova

⋆

⋆

1–2 minutes

✸

MWomen at Forty

by Donald Justice

M
Women
at forty
Learn to close slam softly
loudly
The doors to rooms they will not be 
Coming back to.

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

And
deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy girl
as she practices tying  learns to hold anger
His
father’s tie there  As her mother held, in secret,

And
the face of that father mother,
Still warm soft
with the mystery of lather lipstick.
They are more fathers women than sons daughters themselves now. 
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight
sound
Of the crickets a dog's bark, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of
the slope   
Behind their mortgaged houses.

2 responses to “Women at Forty, a revision”

  1. tuckova Avatar
    tuckova

    To explain:
    What I’m thinking about here is that there is a certain Giving Up in the original poem, that his idea is that men at this stage in their adulthood are not so full of fight anymore; that they are resigned to their fates. And while I don’t want to say that women at this age are angrier, there is a certain greater impatience and unwillingness to bite back on feelings. And I think, too, there is an idealization of fatherhood in the poem that – while I feel that a lot of women have great mothers, mothers they definitely aspire to be, there is a fear of putting up with a lot of what our mothers put up with, somehow. I do understand if I have to explain it then I haven’t done it right.
    “A dog barked” is just the new “crickets”, if you didn’t know:
    http://www.slate.com/id/2256007

    Reply
  2. Wm Thomas Avatar
    Wm Thomas

    Another man hater. I loathe you.

    Reply

Leave a reply to Wm Thomas Cancel reply