Joel Oppenheimer starts with the setup of a joke and then won't let it stay one. "what's gray and comes in quarts" has the shape of a schoolyard riddle, the kind whose answer is meant to be absurd, and the first answer arrives on cue: "an elephant." Then comes the swerve, "or my brain." A brain is gray, and a quart is a measure for liquid, as if thought could be poured out and sold by volume. In a few words the speaker has made himself the punchline.
From there the poem seems to drift, but the drift has a logic. The elephant turns into a particular animal, "gray / and old," a female for whom "they have waited a long / time ... to give birth." Elephants are known for very long pregnancies, so waiting is built into the creature, and the impatient "they" are the onlookers. Slowness becomes the poem's first real subject. Then the speaker steps out of the riddle and speaks plainly: "what i am saying is the age, / we live in, we grow old in, / grayness is not a state of mind." The commas make the sentence stumble through itself, and "the age" does double duty as the era and as old age. The claim is blunt. Gray is not a mood, a dullness of spirit. It is a physical fact, visible in hair, in brain matter, in an old animal's skin.
The next lines are oddly specific: "you have red-blonde hair, another / is black, and there are jews with / orangey hair from the east of europe." It is a roll call of colors that are not gray, delivered in the casual tone of someone pointing people out. Words like "red-blonde" and "orangey" show a speaker who prefers what he has observed to abstraction. The poem never says these heads of hair will turn gray, but their placement invites us to think so.
Advice follows: "come to whatever you come to slowly." Oppenheimer twists a proverb into "haste makes elephants gray before / their time," and the phrase "before their time" returns twice more, once for bears driven from their caves and once for leaves turned too early. Each is something nature schedules, such as aging, hibernation or autumn, and each is spoiled by rushing. The first "before" is stranded at the end of a line while "their time" waits on the next, so the line break makes the reader wait too. Then comes the oddest statement: "only the / weather should control the / climate." Weather is the day-to-day and climate the long pattern, so the sentence is slightly absurd, but its meaning seems clear enough, that natural processes should set the pace and human hurry should not.
The last movement turns to measurement. "where else are we but in / this parallel, caught between our / own isobars" borrows from weather maps, where isobars are lines joining places of equal pressure. People appear as held between lines of pressure, and the word "own" suggests they drew those lines themselves. Then the speaker asks for something almost comically practical: "read the temperature, / make sure it has numbers on it / when it comes out." This answers "not a state of mind." If gray is a fact, it should be measurable, like a thermometer reading rather than a feeling. The poem's last line goes back to where it began, "what's gray / and comes in quarts / is a joke," and the riddle is answered a third time. It could be a shrug, an admission that the whole worry about age and haste is only a joke, or a sign that a joke is the only form light enough to carry such a worry.
There is no rhyme and no capital letters, and the line breaks cut through phrases ("in / the land," "the / climate") so that the poem moves like thinking aloud, with hesitations and corrections. Long *a* sounds run through it in "gray," "age," "waited," "haste," "makes," "caves" and "make," a slow vowel that suits a poem about slowness.
The poem is worth reading because it takes a throwaway joke and uses it to think about aging, patience and the wish for honest numbers, and it does so without self-pity. It shows how much weight a casual voice can carry.