Backward Glances

From Menletter May 2007

By Tim Baehr

When I was in my teens, I looked back at my early adolescence and marveled at how unaware and naïve I had been - suffering from a terminal case of cranio-rectal incursion (yep - head stuck up where the sun don't shine). Then I hit my early twenties, got married, had a kid. I looked back at my teens and thought, "What an utterly naïve dumbass."

And so it went, through my thirties and a divorce, through neo-bachelorhood and remarriage, and various decades of physical and spiritual self-improvement. Every five years or so I would look back and marvel at my then-blindness, deafness, numbness. And it has occurred to me that, in a few years I will look back on today as a time of knowledge but not wisdom, looking but not really seeing, listening but not really hearing.

All these things - seeing, hearing, and being wise - are provisional, in the moment and retrospective (but not retroactive). And I can't jump five years ahead and hijack the wisdom I'll have then; I have to live those five years, live the story and the poetry and then look back at today and shake my head in wonder and, perhaps, compassion for the person I was back then.

I can only hope that each time I manage to extricate my head from my butt I have a slightly clearer notion of what's around me. And I hope that there's some progress each time - a clearer story, and a life remembered by a poet and not a poetaster.