Women at Forty, a revision

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.

Comments

[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

[Wm Thomas]

Another man hater. I loathe you.

[lemonyellow]

Poor Wm Thomas. Another man who can't bear for a woman to speak of herself for herself, for a woman to articulate her viewpoint.

[tuckova]

lemonyellow: I think he's kidding, but I love your solidarity! Thanks.