A man pulls off the road because he is tired of being on it. That small act, "I'd had enough of going / and turned off," drives the whole of Max Reif's poem, and its plainness is deliberate. No crisis is mentioned and no reason is given beyond weariness. The speaker knows no one in Gig Harbor and doesn't know "what was there," and that ignorance is part of the appeal. For once he isn't heading toward something already planned.
The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular beat, and it sounds like someone talking to himself as he walks. Lines are short and often end on small, unemphatic words such as "that" or "of," so the sentences seem to be found rather than composed. They also spill over the stanza breaks: "a pocket / of Puget Sound, // and a sleepy waterfront street"; "that same hand // on another cloudy day." The reader is carried over the gap the way the speaker is carried from a Washington sidewalk back to Massachusetts. Memory arrives mid-sentence, without warning.
Much of the charm is comic. "A shop awning says / 'GALLERY ROW,' / and there are only / two galleries." The capitals promise bustle, and the line break after "only" deflates it. The café "has no wifi," reported without complaint, so an absence reads almost as a gift. The tone is affectionate rather than mocking. The same dry humor sits in "fattest ones out of reach, as always," which compresses a lifetime of reaching for the best fruit into a parenthesis.
The blackberries are the hinge. His outstretched hand triggers a bodily memory from forty years earlier, after "three weeks of Vipassana," a Buddhist meditation practice built on close attention. He remembers feeling "exceptionally lithe" and "anchored in itself." The memory comes with its own small comedy: he sneaks out for breakfast and finds the four retreat teachers at the same diner, "going about their business / as if they didn't know I was there." That studied non-interference echoes through the poem. The "noble taciturn pines" and the lady with her dog are the same kind of company, present but undemanding. The pines get the poem's most dignified adjectives, and it is telling that the grand language goes to trees that say nothing.
The central contrast is between two kinds of movement. In memory, "There was room in that world / to take slow steps, / look around after each one and decide / where you wanted / the next one to take you." The sentence itself walks slowly, pausing at each line. Then comes "shunted to a 40-year tunnel / where things went very fast." "Shunted" is a railway word, and it is passive, so the speaker presents this as something done to him rather than something he chose. A tunnel has no side view, so it is the opposite of looking around after each step. Yet he adds "Don't get me wrong: / lots of good, even great things." Refusing to disown his own life makes the longing more believable.
The ending brings the poem full circle. "I wanted, I wanted" stumbles like someone surprised by the strength of his own feeling. Then the earlier scenery returns almost word for word, "a Gallery Row of two galleries, / and no one at the intersection / except a lady walking her dog," except that now it is an object of desire rather than description. Calling the place a "city" is a last gentle joke. Notice also that the title says "I Want" while the ending says "wanted." Judging by the tenses, the wish may already be sliding into memory, and the poem never says whether he stays.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it does what it recommends. It never lectures about speed or attention. It simply notices a blinking red light, a drizzle, a block of blackberries, and lets those details do the arguing. Its modest scale suits its subject, since a poem about wanting less would sound false if it tried to be grand.