Weathering by Fleur Adcock
Weathering
by Fleur AdcockLiterally thin-skinned, I suppose, my face
catches the wind off the snow-line and flushes
with a flush that will never wholly settle. Well:
that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young for ever, to pass.I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty
nor anything but pretty enough to satisfy
men who need to be seen with passable women.
But now that I am in love with a place
which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,happy is how I look, and that’s all.
My hair will grow grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake, my waist thicken,
and the years work all their usual changes.
If my face is to be weather-beaten as wellthat’s little enough lost, a fair bargain
for a year among the lakes and fells, when simply
to look out of my window at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what
my soul may wear over its new complexion.
As I turned 50, this poem came up more and more, which I love. I might not be surrendering as gracefully as implied, but I think there is something really exquisite about being in love with place (physical or metaphorical) which doesn’t care “how I look, or if I’m happy, happy is how I look.”
Fleur Adcock is a New Zealand poet, and Weathering is from her 1986 collection The Incident Book, written when she was in her early fifties, and it's part of a body of work that has included poetry on aging, family, and the disappointments of intimate life.
