Would you like to read a poem, the kind that you feel deeply before you understand it – almost like a sixth sense – the sense that if you read it more closely it’ll change how you view your life, but also there’s a danger in reading it–a door once opened that cannot be closed because it will tell you, once and for all, what it means to age?
Donald Hall wrote another poem about what it meant be forty, which I read years before I turned that age, and have stuck with me, helping me to understand the feelings I did not have the experience and vocabulary to express.
At some point you move past the need to define what a poem means and you just enjoy it–and find in it a truth that resonates–something that changes you in ways you can’t describe, and its words come to you when you need them, and when you least expect them, alone driving, or walking past tiny stories in tiny New England towns. Words like this will never come to you at moments to impress others, like toasts at dinner parties, or a funerals, or transitions…moments when eloquence is expected; they’re available only when you need the most: not to entertain but to guide, not to inform but to soothe.
A Life of Wonder 
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