Thirteen's no age at all. Thirteen is nothing.That was mid-20th century; thirteen's not like that now, but was very much like that for me then. I was reminded of the odd alienness of being thirteen this afternoon, because I remembered another poem, one that doesn't rhyme so emphatically and that isn't anywhere online. I copied it into a Hilroy notebook when I was thirteen:
It is not wit, or powder on the face,
Or Wednesday matinees, or misses' clothing,
Or intellect, or grace...
Thirteen keeps diaries, and tropical fish
(A month, at most); scorns jumpropes in the spring;
Could not, would fortune grant it, name its wish;
Wants nothing, everything;
Has secrets from itself, friends it despises;
Admits none to the terrors that it feels;
Owns half a hundred masks but no disguises;
And walks upon its heels.
Thirteen's anomalous— not that, not this:
Not folded bud, or wave that laps a shore,
Or moth proverbial from the chrysalis.
Is the one age defeats the metaphor.
Is not a town, like childhood, strongly walled
But easily surrounded; is no city.
Nor, quitted once, can it be quite recalled—
Not even with pity.
--Phyllis McGinley
For OntarioWhich is very autumn and what Toronto is being now. But in fact the poem connects, in my transparent memory, to a pale chill overcast and misty morning in what could as well have been a Toronto January or March and not October at all.
Although I'll never see the purple smoke
Of prairie crocuses without sharp pain
Sudden and sweet: Although I'll never hear
A prairie meadow-lark without a stop
In my quick pulse, an intaking of breath
Till the wild notes are fallen on the air;
Although a kind of day, a certain wind
Will touch me with old wonder, old delight--
Still there is something in these trees, these hills,
This orderly succession of straight roads
And fields; a sober-mantled loveliness
That quickens with content the turn of years;
So if I close my eyes, there is no choice-
This land grows like a garden in my heart.
--Dorothy Livesay
