At Sixty
I have pried up, brushed off the self in me
that hugged secrets—the griever, the night walker,
the peeping-tom who promised to reform,
thumbing through porn all day. Acknowledge all
his lapses, his intensity. Never fault him for feeling:
fault him for what he endangered: creeping into
beds so sweet that he could not recall the breathing.
He bubbled promises to keep his lovers
deaf to the lofty inflections of a desire
that had no mind to remember what it had sworn,
or whom it had been sworn to, or when. Could he expect
to anticipate the lurches of his guilt?
Well, things have changed for the good. The world looks clear.
That self has bleached: his harshest needs are gone.
Yet sometimes at the drawing in of day
when I am too beaten down to lift a spoon
I taste the sharp pepper of his cruelty.
Copyright Credit: Peter Davison, "At Sixty" from The Poems of Peter Davison, 1957-1995. Copyright © 1995 by Peter Davison. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.