The title of “Hindsight,” Jessica Laser’s Issue Fifteen poem, succinctly captures two of its core preoccupations: seeing and direction. For Laser’s speaker, “the seeing of everything” is both a skill and a problem, or a source of problems, overwhelming seers with the multitude of possibilities both in front of them and behind them. Adrift in the Berkshires, pondering a vision of Herman Melville, the speaker of “Hindsight” comes to see seeing itself anew — and turns back to past assumptions with eyes transformed by the unexpected sight before them.
Read the poem online today.
JESSICA LASER
Miraculously, we still made decisions.
Yet we couldn’t live with them, even
the choice to live with our choices.