The poem opens by throwing an insult back at the world. "Who cares what / the slow / guy thinks?" sounds like a defensive shrug, but the rest of the poem answers it: the slow guy thinks a great deal, and he notices things that quicker people walk past. "Slow" carries two meanings here, unhurried and slow-witted, and the poem slides between them. By the end, being slow looks less like a flaw than a way of paying attention.
The first proof is a slug. The speaker watches it "gliding over a rock / on its single / foot," and the line break after "single" makes the reader pause, as if looking closely at the animal's one muscular foot. Then comes the poem's best image: "water / flowing uphill, / Aladdin's carpet." Judging by the imagery, the speaker is seeing the slug's glistening, wet body as a stream that defies gravity. The comparison to a flying carpet is playful and generous. The slowest creature imaginable is given the most magical means of travel in the stories we know. Nothing about the slug has changed, only the quality of the looking.
The second proof moves from the rock into the speaker's own skull. "I like how, / during a yawn, / my head fills / with the roar of / its own surf." Anyone who has yawned widely has heard that low rumble inside the head, and the poem turns it into a private ocean. Water links the two images, the uphill stream and the surf, so the poem seems to flow from outside to inside. A yawn is usually a sign of boredom or tiredness, yet here it becomes a small, free wonder. The word "own" matters, since the speaker needs no one else to supply the spectacle.
Then the poem turns on a comparison: "So much better than / those hiccups / called anger, pride, / shame." Calling big emotions "hiccups" is funny and cutting. Hiccups are involuntary, pointless and a little embarrassing, which is how the speaker views these feelings. The form backs this up. The slug sentence glides across its short lines, but this list jerks forward in fragments, and "shame," sits alone on its own line like a wince. A sound pattern also runs through the poem: "foot," "flowing," "fills," "fever" and "surf" all carry an f, a soft breathy sound that quietly links the pleasures to the poem's last illness.
That illness arrives in the final lines, where the speaker's body "tries to rid itself / of that virus / love." The sparrow detail is odd and lovely: "my poor sam / pee-body — as / the sparrows say." It seems to echo the familiar way people put a sparrow's song into words, "Old Sam Peabody," and the line break splits the name so that "body" and a schoolboy "pee" pop out of it. The effect is comic and humbling, since the speaker's dignity is undercut by a name from birdsong. "Poor" adds pity, though it is affectionate rather than bitter. The bird-given name suggests that the speaker is just another small, fragile animal.
The ending also leaves room for doubt. "Virus" is a cold, clinical word, but "love" lands alone as the last word, with all the warmth the diagnosis tried to drain away. Notice, too, that the body only "tries" to rid itself of the virus. The poem never says it succeeds, and the speaker's tone is wry rather than desperate. Love seems to be the one thing that cannot be dismissed as a hiccup, even though the speaker lists it among the disturbances.
The poem is significant because it argues by example rather than by statement. It never lectures us about mindfulness or patience. It shows a slug, a yawn and a joke about a sparrow, and lets the pleasure of those things make the case. It is written in unrhymed free verse, with short, plain lines and a conversational voice, so the effect feels spoken rather than composed. Its humor keeps it from becoming smug, and its last turn admits that even the calmest observer is subject to a fever he cannot reason away. In about a hundred words, it gives the "slow guy" the final say.