Grief, in Philip Wexler's "Let It Wait," is treated like an unwelcome guest who has turned up too early. The speaker wakes to the cooing of a mourning dove and hears it as a reminder that he "should be crying." He says he has been crying and will be again, but the call "catches me / at a bad time." So he bargains with it. He will hold off "at least until after / breakfast." The poem never says what he is grieving, and that silence is part of its method. We see only how the grief is handled, and the handling is by turns funny, evasive and very sad.
The humour comes from the gap between the size of the feeling and the smallness of the language around it. Sorrow is something to "let loose" like a pent-up sneeze, and it can be scheduled around a muffin. Yet the delay is not simple denial. The speaker knows "I can't delay forever," and the phrase "I tell myself" admits that he is both the negotiator and the one being talked into it. The whole poem sits in that doubleness.
The dove carries a quiet pun. A "mourning dove" sung at the start of "this morning" lets one sound hold both grief and daybreak, and the poem leaves the wordplay unspoken. The speaker then swaps one sound for another, replacing "the dove's plaintive call" with "the whistling of a tea kettle." It is a tiny act of sound editing, and it shows how people use routine to drown out what they would rather not hear.
The routine is described in careful physical detail: a "buttered English muffin," a "clear glass mug of Earl Grey tea," a "bamboo side table," a "wicker chair." The objects are cosy and ordinary, and they work like a small fortress of comfort. The goldfinch breaks into it. "Sunny yellow with black / and white markings," it loops around the sunflowers, "darts away, comes back, gets lost / in the petals, disappears." Its movement is a miniature of the speaker's mood, a flicker of delight that will not stay put. When he lets his "heart soar," he immediately admits, "I feel guilty about it but don't / resist." Joy here comes with a bad conscience. The word "heart" returns a few lines later in the dove's demand that he "cry my heart out," so the same organ is lifted by the bird and weighed down by the dove.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular beat. It is built from seven five-line stanzas, and its sentences run on in a relaxed, speaking voice. The stanza breaks matter most. They often fall in the middle of a thought: "I replace / the dove's plaintive call with" is followed, after a gap, by "the whistling of a tea kettle," and "black" is separated from "and white markings." The reader is made to wait for the end of the sentence, just as the speaker makes grief wait. The form acts out the title.
The ending is where the delay finally runs out. The speaker will not look at his reflection "in the tea," then watches it anyway. The tea goes "lukewarm," the muffin is "long gone," and he postpones the last mouthful "sip by sip." The final line turns the pattern around. His "blurring face" is in the cup, "as it slowly refills drop by drop." Judging by the imagery, those drops are tears falling into the mug, though the poem lets us infer this rather than saying it. Drinking empties the cup, but grief fills it again. The rhythm of "sip by sip" and "drop by drop" suggests the same slow, patient pace in both, as though the speaker's own postponing has become the way he cries.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about how mourning actually behaves. It does not come as one grand scene. It comes in a kitchen, in competition with breakfast and with a bird that makes you briefly happy. By keeping the cause of the sorrow private, Wexler lets any reader recognise the experience of putting off a feeling, and of finding at the bottom of the cup that it was never really postponed.