Waiting is normally a gap, the dull stretch before the real event. Lloyd Addison's "The Wait" (dated '58) makes that gap its subject and then its event. The poem begins as advice: "wait for the girl / lately loved with whom / fate has hungered." Fate is given an appetite, so the love sounds less like a personal choice than something the universe has been starving for. The central claim follows in three single-word lines: "waiting // hastens // fate." The white space between them makes the reader wait, and the paradox is that standing still is what speeds destiny up.
Addison does not explain this idea so much as stage it on the page. In "for the or alternative awaits the ing T H I N G" the syntax comes apart. "Or alternative" cuts in like a second thought, "ing" floats loose without a verb to belong to, and "THING" is spaced out letter by letter, stretched like a slow minute. Then comes the pun "the weights of / wait." Said aloud, *wait* and *weight* are the same sound, so waiting is made to carry mass, something heavy you have to hold. A long *a* sound also runs through the poem like a bell: wait, fate, awaits, weights, gates, late. There is no regular rhyme scheme, but the echo keeps pulling the reader back to the same few ideas.
The middle of the poem turns to weather. "Wonder inside feeling thunders / follows white like lightning lithe as rain / as night roughly lonesome." The grammar is ambiguous. Is the feeling thundering, or is thunder following something white? The sounds do clearer work. The soft *l* in "lightning lithe" slides into "lonesome," and the rain turns from lithe to rough by the time night arrives. Emotion here behaves like a storm that cannot be scheduled. Then the diction suddenly turns legal: "litigation takes long / and the gates of matters early/late." Love becomes a case dragging through the courts, and the slash in "early/late" refuses to say which side of the moment we are on. The next line is blunt: "but two have come too late." The poem never says who the two are. The lovers are the obvious guess, but that is an inference, and the vagueness lets the line hurt more.
The abstract passage that follows is the hardest and the most inventive. "Time out and out doubles outer day." The word *out* keeps multiplying, and "doubt-turning reason" lets *doubt* hide the word *out* inside it. The effect is of thought pushing outward and finding only more distance. The heart appears as a single word in parentheses, "(heart)", tucked aside as if too tender to say in the main line. Then comes the poem's strangest image: "time is a space without entrance / an island in transit away." Islands are supposed to stay put, but this one drifts, so time becomes a place you cannot enter and cannot anchor in, only be stranded on.
The ending resolves the paradox. "Lonesome love has come to visit / time-out-waited-out / to here." The hyphens squeeze the whole ordeal into one compressed word. "Time-out" suggests a pause called in a game, but also time that has run out, and "waited-out" means outlasted. Love arrives only after waiting has outwaited time itself. Even the verb is modest. Love comes "to visit," not to stay, and it is love that is lonesome, not just the lovers. After all the talk of islands and spaces without entrance, the last words, "to here," are plain and solid. Someone has finally arrived somewhere.
The poem is difficult, and some of its fragments resist any single reading. That difficulty is part of its value. It does not describe delay from the outside. It makes the reader feel it, through broken syntax, stretched letters, puns that need to be heard and gaps that need to be sat through. By the time "here" arrives, the reader has done a little waiting too.