Approaching Sixty
Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
W. B. Yeats
In the Central Café
in Innsbruck,
a girl in a dark-blue dress
unlooses her hair from its clasp
so it falls to her waist,
then sits with her friends
to coffee and Sachertorte,
turning her head just once
to look at me,
and all the while winding her hair
in knots and raising it high
so the nape of her neck
is visible, slender and pale
for moments, before the spill
of light and russet
falls down to her waist: falls
back down to her waist across the dark-blue
fabric, while I try hard not to stare:
a man growing old, with a touch
of sciatica, mild
arthritis
and hypertension,
striving to seem a comfortable kind
of scarecrow, not so blinded by desire
as makes the heart a nest of rag and bone,
and still, if she could see it,
not quite foul,
just one of those
who knows what beauty is
and lingers on the ache,
to stay alive.
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2017. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2017 was Roddy Woomble.
Author’s note:
This poem is pretty much what it says on the can: a man approaching sixty sits in the Central Cafe, Innsbruck, (a famous literary and historical spot, though it must be admitted that this particular specimen of ageing manhood is there for the Sachertorte). He is quiet, contented, but then, when he turns around, he sees the young woman pictured in the poem. This, of course, is a tricky situation – and that is what the poem is about, if it is about anything other than a moment of fleeting beauty. I hope the reader will experience a sense of moral confusion (the male gaze and all that) and, at the same time, a hint of celebration that, while the old scribbler descends into creeping infirmity, he can nevertheless celebrate the life and beauty of those who will take his place, while hanging on to his own sense of élan vital.
