You carry sadness in your back
And just don’t know how
The contours of this chair
And how you reckon with them
Ripple through systems of bone and sinew—
Plates, deposits, nerves, Jesus, glands
Welling, throbbing
To resist the crush
Of a new document in Word
Offering the devilish relief
Of thoughts written premature.
Is this waiting? Is this the Great Patience?
Or is this the biting of a hook, over and over
Forever squandering what might have been
Had you not written something just now
Hoping to get somewhere
Instead of trying, just for once,
To sit where you already are.
Is this waiting? Is this the Great Patience?
Or is this the purgatory
Of a glowing white field
Stretching on forever
For those who won’t shut up?
No.
This isn’t waiting. It’s not the Great Patience.
It’s breathing, sitting,
The beginning of a change
The shifting of plates, a falling away
The kind of grasping
That knows nothing of possession
Like hands folded in prayer,
Neither concerned
About which is touching or touched.
