Counting seconds is usually what we do while waiting for something to end. Francis Scudellari's speaker counts them for a different reason: to see whether time can be bargained with. The opening is a small paradox. The seconds "stay still," yet "move faster as i count them," and the speaker has counted them "slow and fast" without being satisfied by either speed. So what follows is a surprise. Instead of racing time or resisting it, the speaker will "settle / in the middle / of them" and "slide in right between them." The poem is about that narrow space between one second and the next, and what it means to live there.
The sound of those lines does half the work. The s-sounds gather ("seconds," "still," "slow," "settle," "slide") until the verse itself seems to hush and slip. The line breaks help too. "In the middle" and "of them" each get a line of their own, so the reader is slowed and made to sit inside the phrase, just as the speaker sits inside time.
In those gaps, the speaker says, "i was, and / i am, a wish." The verb tenses refuse to stay in order: *was, am, can, will, we'll be, have.* Inside a gap, past, present and future don't need separate rooms. That also explains how the speaker can "wish me there, / and wish her, / and him, and her again." The people arrive in a list, unnamed, almost like seconds being counted. The poem never says who they are, and it doesn't need to. What matters is the "all of us" they become, a group made of wishes rather than facts.
Then the poem turns physical. The wishes are "spelled out in smiles," so wishing becomes a kind of writing, and the smiles are "meant to wrinkle, and increase / with that wrinkling." That is an unusual thing to hope for. Ageing is normally what time does *to* us, but here the creases are a wish granted, proof of smiling done often enough to leave a mark. The catalogue of skin ("the freckled, and the pale, the mahogany") and then of eyes ("green, / gray, blue, brown, black") widens the circle to many faces without ranking them. "Bridges of noses" is a precise, slightly surprising phrase. It names the spot where a smile creases the face, and it also suggests connection, which suits a poem about being *between* things.
The form supports all this. There are no capital letters anywhere, not even for "i," so the speaker seems to be thinking quietly rather than announcing. There is no rhyme scheme and no regular meter, just one unbroken block of free verse. Lines tend to end on small, unstressed words such as "and," "as" and "whether," so each sentence keeps leaning forward without ever quite landing. Commas interrupt constantly: "i can, / and i will," sounds like someone persuading themselves in real time. Instead of meter, the rhythm comes from return. "Wish" and "wishes," "sparkling," "sparkle" and "sparkled," and the doubled "whether" all repeat like a count.
The title, "i am what can," is deliberately incomplete. "Can" is left without its verb, so possibility has no fixed object. The speaker's identity rests on capacity rather than achievement. That is why the ending can say "whether those wishes come true, or whether / or not i am and can be" without sounding defeated. The sparkle belongs to the wishing itself: "we sparkle being them."
The last line gives the seconds a new role. They began as things to count, speed up and slow down. Now they are "all now, the seconds, here with me." The word "all" echoes the earlier "all of us," so the seconds join the circle of wishes rather than ticking past it.
The poem's significance lies in this quiet argument: hope can be a way of being present rather than a prediction about the future. It also shows students how form can act out meaning, since the poem slows its reader down in the same way the speaker slows the clock.