This is the title poem from my new book Wait
which will be out at the end of the year, beginning of next
and which all these poems are from.
"Wait."
"Chop, hack, slash.
Chop hack, slash.
Cleaver, boning knife, axe.
Not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher
could do this so crudely, time as
do you dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail.
One part of my body 100 years old,
one not even there anymore.
Another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth
I was for whom everything always was
going too slowly, too slowly.
It was me then who chopped, slashed, through you,
across you, relished you, gorged on you,
slugged your invisible liquor down raw.
Now you're polluted.
Pulse, clock, calendar taint you, befoul you.
You suck at me, pull at me.
Barbed wire knots of memory tear me.
My heart hangs inert, a tag end of tissue firing,
misfiring, trying to heave itself back to its other way
with you.
But was there ever really any other way with you?
When I ran as though for my life,
wasn't I fleeing from you or for you?
Wasn't I frightened you'd fray, leave me nothing but shreds?
Aren't I still?
When I snatch it one of your moments and clutch it,
a pebble, a planet, isn't it wearing away in my hand
as though I, not you, were the ocean of acid, the corrosive
in which I dissolve?
Wait, though.
Wait.
I should tell you too how happy I am.
How I love it so much.
All of it.
Chopping and slashing and all.
Please know I love especially you, how every morning you
turn over the languorous earth, for how would she
know otherwise to do dawn to do dusk
when all she hears from her speech creatures is wait?
We whose anguished wish is that our last word not be wait.
Thank you."
[APPLAUSE]