Turning Fifty
I do not feel fifty years old. I’m not fifty, not for another four days, so perhaps that is why, but I also don’t feel forty-nine and three hundred sixty-one days either. Granted, I also don’t know what fifty, (or 49.9890411) ought to feel like it, so I reckon what I really mean when I think that, as I have been doing lately, is that when I think about other people who either are or have been in that age range, I imagine more wisdom, more gravitas, more seriousness, more certainty. And more wrinkles, more grey hair. One set of my grandparents were in their fifties when I was a toddler, and my memories of them, and also in the photos I have of them from that time period, they look much older than I feel. They look like senior citizens, and I do not at all feel like a senior citizen.
No, I feel like my life is just beginning, which, factually, is very wrong; if I meet life expectancy averages, my life is about two-thirds over. If I’m lucky then maybe it’s three-fifths over, but there is most likely less to come than what’s already come to pass. But that’s quantitative, and perhaps because what’s happening in my life qualitatively is both so great, and so jam-packed with beauty, joy, and fulfillment in my relationships, career and avocational pursuits, it’s hard to feel old. I also feel like I’ve only very recently figured out who this John Paul Davis character is, what he’s about, what’s important to him, what makes him tick.
Then too there is a sort of dilation effect childhood and being young creates. 1924, a century ago, feels, as it always has, incredibly distant, almost the stuff of tall tales, legends, myths, fables. History. Recently I watched the TV series 1923, set in that year, and they're all still riding horses everywhere and worried about how dish washers and marketing razors to women (who didn’t shave their legs or underarms in the early 20th century; they had to be marketed at, taught to want it, which is to say taught to believe there was something wrong with them as they were, a whole entire category of money-spending and health risk and anxiety just created by the unholy admixture of sexism and advertising. But I digress) are going to ruin the world or at least make it a worse place (which, we are coming to realize, they totally did.) Yet I know, or, rather, knew, a lot of people, my grandparents included, who were alive then and have memories of it, so in that sense, a century ago is much much closer to me than it feels.
At the same time, 1974, another year I equally can’t remember, feels like it was just a few weeks ago, or like it’s a neighborhood I could somehow get to if I could just remember the convoluted directions, over there, across town, the Seventies. But that was fifty years ago! By which I mean it is much much farther from me than I feel it is.
Time, it turns out, doesn’t simply move forward at the rate of one second per second. It slips through your grasp, like a wet balloon half-filled with water. It jumps from place to place like a curious bee. It goes backward even, though, reluctantly, like a golden retriever who would really rather not. The past is simultaneously a long long ways away, and also much much closer, like a town in a valley while you walk down a mountain. To do that you’ll need to go around the mountain, or at the very least go side to side along one face of it, so the town’s distance, relative to you, will sometimes be further away the closer you get.
It turns out, I may have mentioned above, that I have a lot to be grateful for in this, my fiftieth year. One of those things is the recent publication of my second book of poems, Climbing A Burning Rope, by University of Pittsburgh Press in February. I remember once, a writing professor of mine in undergrad, Bill Hallberg, advising, I think, patience, when he told me writers mostly usually get going in middle age. One of the valuable things I learned in his fiction-writing class was that I was more interested in poetry, but as fiction writing classes go, it was a great poetry writing class, because it was a great writing class, period. “Writers remember,” Bill also once said to me when I asked him how to figure out where the hell this story I was writing was going. I’m still not sure if he was saying that is a writer’s charge — to remember — or if people who remember tend to become writers, or possibly both.
At any rate, the book is out there, in the world, orderable from UPitt Press itself, your favorite online vendor (but please, unless it is your only option, order from somewhere other than Amazon), and not only that but some reviews of it have been written, and the reviewers, who are strangers to me, seem to both have picked up what I was putting down, and in both cases, seen things in my poems that I myself did not see or consciously plan, but which are definitely there, which is why I do not rule out the idea of inspiration, or magic, or the Holy Ghost, or some kind of ghost, or something for which I have no name showing up when I showed up. (My wife is an actor, and I once overheard a colleague of hers say, about a particularly electric performance of a play they were in, “God was on stage tonight,” and learning new truths about my own poems in my own book, seeing, through the eyes of others the funky and deep shit that is totally in them, feels that way.)
I link to the reviews here, now, for you to enjoy. I hope you dig the poems and buy the book. Which would be the best birthday present.
London Grip Poetry Review