December 2018
Kate Sontag
sontagk@ripon.edu
After 22 years of teaching in the prairies of Wisconsin, I now live in the Berkshires with my husband and two spaniels where I'm grateful for mountain views and swims in as many lakes as possible once the ice thaws and before it returns. I am co-editor (with David Graham) of After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf), and I'm published widely in journals and anthologies. My most recent work appears in Villanelles (Everyman's Library), Cooking With The Muse (Tupelo), SoFloPoJo, and One. I have a pantoum forthcoming in Raintown Review and I'm editing an anthology of poems about hair.   

Women At Sixty
          —after Donald Justice's "Men at Forty"
 
Women at sixty 
learn to love themselves
 
in a new way— 
like thirty, forty, and fifty
 
but more immensely.
At sixty they
 
have more plot twists
to add to stories
 
they tell, more words
and memories to fill
 
more pages. Their voices 
have matured like their
 
bookshelves that hold
their houses up
 
with another decade's 
worth of truth
 
and fiction. True, the body
at sixty is a stage itself
 
to cross, coat pockets
concealing more ticket
 
stubs from heaven
to hell and back again
 
than we can count
birch spines bowing  
 
over half a century.
But women at sixty
 
know resilience is key,
bounce old disappointments
 
off fresh infatuations
and successes, the present
 
its own prize. We leave
museums hungry, battle
 
expressways to the beach,
feel sand beneath our foot soles
 
receive us then release
us forward, our skirts
 
rolled into our hands,
or not, as we get wet
 
in the mermaid tide, yell
our age without apology
 
to the celebratory sea,
toss the peach pit 
 
as far as we can.  ​
 ​​© 2018 Kate Sontag
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