Thrust into time and space,
everybody enters in medias res.
What had come before?
Readers, as Trollope noted long ago,
prefer the cart
with its intriguing human cargo
to the plodding horse.
Of course –
cut to the chase!
How much time,
that limited resource,
does any of us want to sacrifice
listening or trying or pretending to listen
to the clip-clop pace
of a backstory laden with detail?
Each of us has their individual clock.
Is yours set early or late?
Patience is a pool we dip into.
Everyone has their own.
(Is yours deeper than mine?)
Hearing the rhythmic drone
of someone else’s step-by-step narration,
I lose no time before,
immediately elsewhere,
my attention drifts
off into the air.
Patience is both a pool
and also something solid,
liable to erosion –
as in “My patience has worn thin” –
an old shoe sole.
Wearing those old shoes, you stub your toe
against the hidden limit
(hidden but no less thick)
of what you can take in.
Shall I bore you by telling you my dream?
Best not to lasso you
further into the dim
corral where we’re all wandering already,
more than half abstracted,
wading through swaths of story toward our private
enclosures, which turn out to be
both invisible and universal.
The prose horse pulls the cart of poetry.