Waiting Rooms

What great genius invented the waiting room?

Every sublime idea no doubt is simple, but

Simplicity alone is never enough.

A cube sequestered in space and filled with time,

Pure time, refined, distilled, denatured time

Without qualities, without even dust...

Dust in a sunbeam between Venetian blinds

Where a boy and his mother wait . . . Eternity!

But I am straying from the subject: waiting rooms.

All over the globe, in the great terminals

And the tiny rooms of disbarred abortionists,

For transport, diagnosis, or divorce . . .

Alas! Maybe this mighty and terrible theme

Is too much for me. But wait! I have an idea.

You've heard it said, of course, that anything

May instantly turn into everything

In this world secreting figures of itself

forever and everywhere? How wonderful

That is, how horrible. Wherever you wait,

Between anticipation and regret,

Between the first desire and the second

Is but the razor of a moment, is

Not even time; and neither is motion more,

At sixty miles an hour or six hundred,

Than an illusion sent by devils to afford

Themselves illusory laughs at our expense

(we suffer, but they become no happier).

Think how even in heaven where they wait

The Resurrection, even in the graves

Of heaven with the harps, this law applies:

One waiting room will get you to the next.

Even your room, even your very own,

With the old magazines on the end tables,

The goldfish in the bowl below the window

Where the sunbeam falls between Venetian blinds . . .

And in the downstairs hall there is your mailbox,

One among many gathering paper and dust,

A waiting room in figure, summing up

Much in a little, the legendary box

Where hope only remains. You wait and see.