The Millennial Pedestrian

My last post, "Eat," was the outcome of an assignment in a poetry workshop in which we were asked to write a poem using the EXACT number of lines and words per line as in a poem we chose by Galway Kinnell. Well. Here’s the Kinnell poem "Eat" was patterned on. The exercise is interesting: it starts out like a crossword puzzle in which you’re simply trying to fill spaces with words that fit. Then you find that it’s more like writing a sonnet, where the stringencies of the form require you to make choices that wind up being creative ones.

Wait
    By Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
Their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.