Someone keeps calling the speaker back, and the speaker keeps saying no. Nelson Barr never says who is calling. It could be a lover, the past, or the speaker's own appetite. That vagueness helps, because the poem is less about the caller than about what has changed in the one who is called. The central idea is that witnessing suffering can make an old desire impossible to return to. The refusal begins as a declaration but ends as something closer to a bodily fact.
The phrasing sets the tone. "Call me not back" and "i go not that way again" reverse normal word order, so they sound like a vow or a line from an old hymn. Against that formality sit the lowercase "i," the casual "thru," and the slash that closes each refrain in place of a full stop. The slash works like a gate swinging shut. There is no rhyme, but "again" returns at the end of each section, so the word rhymes with itself and the repetition pounds like a door being closed.
The first two sections build a world of heat and appetite. The streets are "loveless" and "dirt-strewn," a grimy public landscape, and the "eddying pools of summer want" turn in circles. "Want" means both desire and lack, and the swirling water suggests a longing that circles without arriving. The bedroom images grow more intense: "silent hallway lusts," "sheets of fire," "dark pubic pressures." The hard p sounds in that last phrase press against each other. Yet the eyes are "diamond-glazed," and a diamond is hard and cold even in all that heat. A little frost is already in the glitter. The one gentle phrase is "the tender heat of small rose-nippled breasts," and it matters because it makes the refusal costly. The speaker is turning away from something that was tender as well as feverish.
Then comes "for now is winter," and the poem's temperature drops. What the speaker has seen is "blind children" who "weep / on bruised knees / around a frozen pond." The pond answers the earlier "pools." The moving, swirling water has stopped and set hard. There is also an irony in the verb: the children are blind, yet the speaker says "i have seen." The ones who cannot see suffer, and the one who can see cannot forget. Because "small" breasts sit not far from small children, a reader may infer that the speaker links desire with harm to innocence. The poem never says so, and the unexplained link is part of what unsettles it. Winter may stand for age, conscience, or simply a season of clear sight, and the poem leaves the choice to the reader.
The ending is the most carefully built part. The refrain returns but is broken: "with this sight my heart and feet are ice / and i can / go not that way again/." The line break leaves "i can" alone for a moment, so it reads like a boast of ability before "go not" arrives. Two meanings open up. The speaker is able to refuse, and the speaker is unable to move. Earlier, "i go not" was a statement of will. Now the body has made the decision, with feet too frozen to walk back. The ice that has reached the heart also finishes what the "diamond-glazed" eyes began, and the fire of the earlier lines is gone.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it explains. It gives no sermon and no account of what happened, only a sequence of temperatures: summer fire, then winter ice. The movement from one to the other carries the whole change of heart. The poem also shows that a refusal can be a kind of grief. The speaker is not triumphant about leaving that world behind, and the lines are too numb for triumph. They sound like someone who has seen something that cannot be unseen and whose old warmth is no longer within reach.