To My Fifties

Never done: Shadow post

Every now and then I do something that is too private to write about publicly. This is one of those times. But rest assured I am writing about it privately, and will fit it into the big picture at the end of the year. Speaking of the year, I'm 60% through, which is kind of like being in the middle age of my project. I just read a beautiful poem by Kenneth Koch (from Knopf Poem-A-Day) from the perspective of a man who has just left his Fifties, and entered his Sixties. I found it incredibly helpful to look forward into my Fifties from his perspective looking back. I'd like to share it with you.

To My Fifties

I should say something to you
Now that you have departed over the mountains
Leaving me to my sixties and seventies, not hopeful of your return,
O you, who seemed to mark the end of life, who ever would have thought that you would burn
With such sexual fires as you did? I wound up in you
Some work I had started long before. You were
A time for completion and for destruction. My
Marriage had ended. In you I sensed trying to find
A way out of you actually that wasn't toward non-existence.
I thought, "All over." You cried, "I'm here!" You were like traveling
In this sense, but on one's own
With no tour guide or even the train schedule.
As a "Prime of Life" I missed you. You seemed an incompletion made up of completions
Unacquainted with each other. How could this be happening? I thought. Or
What should it mean, exactly, that I am fifty-seven? I wanted to be always feeling desire.
Now you're a young age to me. And, in you, as at every other time
I thought that one year would last forever.
"I did the best possible. I lasted my full ten years. Now I'm responsible
For someone else's decade and haven't time to talk to you, which is a shame
Since I can never come back." My Fifties! Answer me one question!
Were you the culmination or a phase? "Neither and both." Explain! "No time. Farewell!"