Passing Through

By Stanley Kunitz 1905–2006 Stanley Kunitz

—on my seventy-ninth birthday

Nobody in the widow’s household

ever celebrated anniversaries.

In the secrecy of my room

I would not admit I cared

that my friends were given parties.

Before I left town for school

my birthday went up in smoke

in a fire at City Hall that gutted

the Department of Vital Statistics.

If it weren’t for a census report

of a five-year-old White Male

sharing my mother’s address

at the Green Street tenement in Worcester

I’d have no documentary proof

that I exist. You are the first,

my dear, to bully me

into these festive occasions.

Sometimes, you say, I wear

an abstracted look that drives you

up the wall, as though it signified

distress or disaffection.

Don’t take it so to heart.

Maybe I enjoy not-being as much

as being who I am. Maybe

it’s time for me to practice

growing old. The way I look

at it, I’m passing through a phase:

gradually I’m changing to a word.

Whatever you choose to claim

of me is always yours;

nothing is truly mine

except my name. I only

borrowed this dust.

Stanley Kunitz, “Passing Through” from Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected. Copyright © 1966, 1995 by Stanley Kunitz. Reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: Passing Through: The Later Poems New and Selected (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1995)

Biography

Stanley Kunitz became the tenth Poet Laureate of the United States in the autumn of 2000. Kunitz was ninety-five years old at the time, still actively publishing and promoting poetry to new generations of readers. In the New York Times Book Review, Robert Campbell noted that Kunitz's selection as poet laureate—the highest literary honor in America—"affirms his stature as perhaps the most distinguished living American poet." . . .

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