"Catch your breath" is what we say to someone who has just stopped running: slow down, recover, you're safe now. Jason Ridpath's six-line poem borrows that kindly phrase and then refuses to honour it. Nothing in the lines that follow allows a pause. The poem is about a creeping, uneasy awareness of mortality, and about how little we do with that awareness except fill time with small distractions. Its central idea arrives in the last line: dread of the future and the fact of the past close in on each other until almost no present is left between them.
The first four lines contain no verbs at all. "Awareness of death." "Impending doom, unrest." These are fragments, closer to a list of symptoms than a considered thought, and that seems to be the point: the speaker cannot build a full sentence around the feeling. The nouns are abstract and heavy, and "impending" is well chosen, since it literally means hanging over. Then come two lines built on repetition: "Another sip. Another guess." The poem never says what is in the glass, but a sip taken against a background of doom suggests something drunk to dull the nerves. Pairing it with "guess" is neat. One is a bodily action, the other a mental one, and both are small, noncommittal and endlessly repeatable. The doubled "Another" gives the sense of a loop, a habit that has already gone round many times.
Verbs finally arrive in line five, and the grammar changes with them. "Casket comes around too fast." For four lines the speaker has been passive, sipping and guessing. Now the subject of the sentence is a coffin, and it is the one doing the moving. After the abstractions "death" and "doom" we get something with a lid and handles. "Comes around" suggests a circuit, like a carousel, a turn or a calendar. One could also hear a round of drinks in it, which would tie the line back to the sip, though that is a reading rather than something the poem insists on. The complaint "too fast" is oddly casual, like someone grumbling about a late bus, and that ordinariness is what makes it chilling.
Sound and rhythm do much of the work. The short lines each end in a full stop, and each stop acts like a gulp of air. The reader has to catch their breath every few syllables, yet the pauses bring no calm. They sound more like panting. Rhyme is withheld and then delivered. "Unrest" and "guess" make only a near rhyme, close but never quite settled, which suits the unrest they describe. "Fast" and "past" lock together as a full rhyme, clicking shut like a lid. Line length follows the same path. The poem moves from bursts of four and five syllables to a seven-syllable line and finally a twelve-syllable one, the longest of all, as if its momentum has overrun its clipped breaths.
That last line deserves a slow read: "Echoes of the future are now the distant past." An echo normally follows a sound, so "echoes of the future" turns cause and effect inside out, as if the future gives off its reverberations before it has happened. A reasonable reading is that these echoes are the warnings of the opening lines, the "awareness" and the "impending doom", and that by the time the speaker thinks to act on them they are already far behind. The word "now" sits between "future" and "past" like a narrow footbridge, and the sentence crosses it in an instant. There is also a paradox in the pairing of "fast" and "distant": a great deal of ground has been covered in no time. The poem's final word, "past", answers "fast", so the form itself ends on an echo.
Its significance lies in how much it asks of a few plain words. Reminding readers that life is short is an old habit of poetry, but here there is no ornament and no consolation, only everyday vocabulary like "sip", "guess" and "too fast". The title is a command the poem cannot obey. The poem is quick to read, yet it leaves the reader in the position it describes: it is over before they have caught their breath.