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." While we never may be able to go back, exactly, we have the good fortune, through Mr. Brodsky's great skill in measuring the distances 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 ". . . 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.