Good Times

[Powder]

But I find that construction less interesting than breaking it up a bit.  Really, there's nothing so unusual about the construction that I use, especially if you remove the commas.

That's just a matter of taste then I suppose.

How did I know the good times wouldn’t last?

This is a rhetorical question, the purpose of which is to convey that I understand, today, that my 30-year-old thought created a psychological boundary.

In just five words I wiped away my future.

This must come after the question because it rests on the understanding that a boundary was created.

If you used it rhetorically then shouldn't it be more along the lines of 'How could I have known that the good times wouldn't last?'

Because how did I know implies that you already knew back then that you knew. It doesn't show that you are looking back from now. Which is why I took it in a different way (I did consider whether it was rhetorical). If that is the case you can disregard my comment regarding the question breaking up the first stanza but I'd still rewrite it in this way to more explicitly state the tense of the sentence.

Not that the young Caleb actually knew [that he was creating a boundary for himself],

but he did:

Here is where the poem lost me then. I feel like the implied aspect of the first line (the part between brackets) isn't really conveyed by the poem as is. Which is why the first and second line of the second stanza seem to become needlessly vague. Because the poem, to me, seems to state that he didn't know whether the good times would last, rather than whether he created a boundary.

Oh and by the way

he looked down a bright and sunny
road so far that he saw the end, and by
anticipating brought it to him sooner.

I thought were good as is as well, I said so in my original comment, the rewriting was just an attempt to include the question as I originally interpreted it into the stanza. Which can, now that I see the meaning that you were going for, obviously be disregarded.

Thanks for your response.

Kind regards,

Powder.