Waiting

Waiting is a thing at first smaller than I am, then getting larger
the longer I wait, or perhaps I make it larger, it grows
from my growing anger and frustration, or I grow smaller
from losing control of my time which I had foolishly thought
my own, from the space of my waiting become a vastness,
end unseen, and for all I know I’m traveling backwards
through the space of my waiting, my destination nothing more
than not waiting, and that lies behind as much as before me.
In offices magazines are the windows of waiting,
mainly flipping from back to front without much reading
because they rarely have the subscriptions I want. Other people
are waiting, some from before me for God knows how long
because waiting drags us to the bottom of ourselves
within minutes and we are as drowned in it from thirty minutes
of waiting as much as from an hour of waiting, and anything longer
is not waiting in my book, but simple abandonment. Some people
come after and start their waiting on top of my own, I am sandwiched
between the elder and younger waiters and am struck by the fact
that I have no knowledge or wisdom to pass on except how long
I have been waiting, which is nothing more than the numbness
of numbers. Some people wait with children who are the demons
of waiting, or who are in my more generous mind bedeviled
by waiting on adults who wait and who often know no more
than their children exactly why they wait, but are more beaten down
by the concept and the rules of waiting, to wit: that one waits one’s turn
(such mindless equality, and yet I suspect there are people
who never wait at all nor use the same door, just as there are people
who never go to jail or pay their taxes); that one has the right
to complain after a certain amount of waiting but that
complaining does absolutely no one any good at all
and might even make one wait longer; that one should be resolute
about not waiting forever, but should instead leave
after a certain number of hours to preserve a modicum
of dignity and sanity no matter what one is waiting for;
that one cannot say when one is finally called: “My turn?
Really? Well! Now you’ll have to wait a bit for me, I’m afraid!”
as it would not be the least bit funny; that our waiting is compounded,
not shared; and that a room full of people waiting is a room
full of something short of despair, but that all the same
we wait in this world as we leave it, each of us entirely alone.

*

Poetry as phenomenological investigation; or, wringing what you can from the common experiences -- except that I tend to get distracted by the sound of the language, as do many poets, which subverts the phenomenology, I suppose...

This draft has a certain arc to it, suggests a particular archetypal scene of "waiting" (mainly, of course, a doctor's office), but as I wrote, I felt the possibilities of so many other forms of waiting: waiting for a bus, a particularly nightmarish form of waiting for anyone who has lived in a city like Houston and not had a car for any period of time; waiting on hold on the phone -- although that's much easier, now, with Speaker Mode; waiting in a clothing store for your partner to finish shopping; waiting for your meal in a busy and extremely obnoxiously trendy restaurant; many many more -- what would you add to the list? Maybe I'll do a series of "waiting" poems.

As for form: a much longer line, increasing the challenge of maintaining linear integrity (some sense of a regular beat, some sort of symmetry built around some sort of caesura or at least a strong forward thrust, helped along by a high frequency of enjambed lines), very long sentences over those long lines, all toward recreating the psychology of waiting, I suppose; and as always with me of late, a fugal pulse -- "wait" or "waiting" repeated thirty times in a forty-line poem, across all but twelve of those lines; creating, I hope, a kind of reverb, an aural environment that vibrates backwards and forwards in the poem -- because a poem, by definition, is a text that backscatters as it evolves -- like Antarctic ice, or Saharan dunes.

Meanwhile, I have this book on my To-Read list, but am waiting for the price to go down a little bit; but the Google Books preview is certainly a delight: On Waiting (Thinking in Action)