I don’t do forward.
Forward is sagging flesh and aching limbs.
There is death and work there. There is mundane exhaustion.
Every forward day puts the Look-Back in front of me.
The lithe and happy young woman waits at the deli counter
in her tight, white jeans with cascading waves of
strawberry blonde spilling over shoulders like the stream
that carried me in the West Virginia hills
over cold, smooth rocks as smooth as her skin.
As smooth as mine as I slid over rocks into the
glassine oval of mountain water, below
in the Look-Back.
I hear a man in a café laughing with his parents. I visit mine
in the Look-Back. I kiss their cheeks and sit with them at the table
in the kitchen.
In the Look-Back I read the cards that came in the
mail that tell me where they are, what they’ve done, that they miss me.
I hear their voices on the phone and look forward to weekends
in the guest room and long walks at dusk, the scrub jays diving for peanuts from our hands.
The same hands.
Burgers wait on the grill and happy hour is five minutes away in the Look-Back.
I listen to a woman in the library with her little girl as she reads Goodnight
Moon aloud and I am in my daughter’s room in the Look-Back.
I am tickling her. I’m fishing a lima bean out of her nose,
the nose of my tow-headed child.
They are cruel, these laughing couples around me in the Forward.
They laugh and tease and
believe they will be together forever. They will never be old.
They will always be in love.
In the look-back I am too.
I am still touched there.
And there, and …there.
I am like Lot’s wife who had no name that filled her soul.
I do not look forward. Forward holds no promise except that of
heartbreak, and regret.
There is shame in the Forward. There is sadness and struggle.
There is sagging flesh and aching limbs.
There is work and mundane exhaustion,
and the occasional occasion.
You tell me not to look back?
I turn hard at your command.
I turn hard toward my home.
Go forward and be pleased at your sanctimony.
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