June Lausch – Men at Forty by Donald Justice

It’s worth noting that Donald Justice was only forty-one in 1966 when this poem was published.  It speaks to me from a different generation, of a serious resignation to ageing, with expectations of maturity, responsibility and well-polished shoes.

Forty seems to me now to be joyfully and absurdly young but at my first reading of the poem, at City University in the 1990s I remember that I found it deeply unsettling.  I had recently passed that birthday milestone and I was asking myself the most brutal of questions: Am I old? It was difficult to concentrate on critical appreciation when my own sub-text was so fraught.  Eventually the sheer quality of the poem, juxtaposed with Michael’s reading, his beaming smile and forever-young persona, proved so engaging that I pulled through.

Michael greatly admired this poem for its craftsmanship. It is sparely and concisely written, with a masterly use of concrete imagery. It clearly demonstrates one of Michael’s key tenets: to show, not tell. There is no direct mention of age or the passing of time.  Instead, the poem works on images of closing doors, descending staircases and mirrors. Justice uses the image of a bathroom mirror, to reflect across generations, a device that Michael used himself, conjuring his own father in Caliban’s Books and later on, his son in Haunts.

This is probably the main lesson I learned from Michael: the power of a well-chosen image, not as a static prop but as something mutable and open to different interpretation.  A successful image is alive, sometimes illusory, often morphing into something else, “two profiles in silhouette, or else a chalice, depending how you look”.

As a teacher Michael was always encouraging and supportive but I remember the first time I wrote a poem using effective imagery … his appreciation at my rite of passage. After that I had an idea of what I was aiming for. It was something like magic!

Michael was incredibly serious about poetry and writing but alongside that, he had a tremendous spirit of playfulness. I am smiling now as I remember something I saw him do on stage, at least twice.  He would reach into his pocket and suddenly discover an exotic feather, like one from a feather boa or a fin-de-siècle Parisian bordello. He then addressed the audience with a quizzical look, raising the question of how it got there. The perfect mix of image, innuendo and delight!

It amuses me that after a longish life, I can only recall two jokes and they were both from Michael, when he entertained us after class in The Bull.  It’s the way he told ‘em!

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 trying
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