Compulsive Obsessive

if I place this object
here
and not

there,

if I clean the bathtub
one more time,

light the candle at eight,
extingquish it before

the bass bell
of the old clock
tocks itself out
of another waiting day,

if I align
the several boxes

(hard wood, with a soft center,
a tiny padded cell,
blue silk, once perfumed)

in idealistic rows
I know you will return
to me.

Then, I
will have nothing
that I have to do
but love you...

Waiting

Fill this anticipation--be it with dread, excitement, or curiosity--and its essential feeling will remain the same. It is a disconcerting emotion. It is both subtle and complex. There is that itch of impatience at the heart of it, and the nausea of uncertainty churning in the gut. There is the frustration, a kind of sweat that covers the whole experience, that reminds you of the unsympathetic rigidity of your limitations in time and space. Waiting, percolating in brooding agitation: This is the sickness without a cure. Waiting presumes a time and a place affixed in an unreachable future: "There is the oasis. There is the oasis. There is the mirage." This untenable quality of the ultimate destination is unnerving. Sitting with this impossibility becomes the lesson, because it would be unbearable if it remained only the burden, only the fact.