You Can't Go Back, Exactly

In You Can’t Go Back, Exactly, Louis Daniel Brodsky shows us, with delight and poignancy, how “a few of earth’s miracles work.” Recapturing the freshness of youthful summers in Wisconsin at Camp Nebagamon for Boys, the poet writes with gentle tenderness of a father’s love for his son, of the strength of friendship, of the resonance of memory and time: “Our heart-sparks brighten the darkness.” While we never may be able to go back, exactly, we have the good fortune, through Mr. Brodsky’s great skill in measuring the distance between past and present “with metaphor and rhyme-chime,” to have, for a moment, a fleeting glimpse of a lake cabin’s screen door kept “from closing forever,” while the deepest wisdom of the heart is “Arrested forever in the dripping sunset’s net.” The father knows that the ritual he initiates in bringing his son to camp “Contains the same words and phrases/ The Lord spoke to Abraham about Isaac,” while the poet celebrates a return to “this sacred place” where the beauty of the ephemeral and the wonder of the eternal become one. Darlene Mathis-Eddy, Poetry Editor, Ball State University Forum