In the list of deep, basic poetic subjects, fathers must rank right up there with death and the moon. On Father’s Day “Those Winter Sundays” pops up in the poetry columns of the few locals papers that have them. “Daddy” and “My Papa’s Waltz” probably do not.
Yesterday as I was trying to recall father poems, I kept coming back to Donald Justice’s “Men at Forty,” in which fathers figure:
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 is 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 rhyme is quiet in this poem; forty/softly, mirror/rediscover, sound/houses ring so softly as to go unnoticed at first. The father/lather rhyme makes a central moment of double revelation. In shaving, the speaker is unmasked, as his father was before; when the speaker finds his father in his own face, the speaker and the father are discovered again.
In a way it’s fitting that poetry is a place where we try to recognize kin. The whole of language is vast, meadow-like, populated with words and ceaselessly evolving word-structures. Sonically, connotatively, etymologically, tonally, words exist in states of satisfying correspondence or electrifying disjunction. Poets exploit these likenesses, histories, and edges. A poem, looked at one way, is a little machine that runs on the currents of family resemblance.