Uptick - Analysis

A joke that opens onto a metaphysics of leftover

The poem’s central move is to start with a casual, almost comic observation about time and end by treating art as a strange, damp mirror: it isn’t the speaker who reads poetry, but poetry that reads us / to us. The opening scene—We were sitting there—sounds like conversation, the kind where someone riffs to keep things light. Yet the joke about minutes that don’t dovetail, about one minute running out / faster and then catches up, quietly proposes a world where the usual logic of sequence breaks down. The speaker tries to make this breakdown comforting: if time overlaps and catches itself, then there can be no waste. That brisk conclusion feels like a bid for control, as if naming the problem (time’s unevenness) could solve it.

No waste vs the stubborn fact of waste

A key tension is that the poem both insists waste can be eliminated and can’t stop circling the idea. The repetition—Waste is virtually eliminated—is telling: virtually is not actually. Even in the speaker’s confident tone, there’s a faint hedge, a digital or imaginary success rather than a real one. And the initial image of minutes failing to fit—time not dovetail-ing—already implies remainder: if things don’t join cleanly, something is left over. The poem’s voice sounds amused, but the amusement has an edge, like someone joking to avoid admitting how disturbing the thought is.

Returning to the painting: the present as an uneasy pose

The poem then performs a turn: To come back for a few hours to / the present subject, a painting. That phrase for a few hours makes the present feel temporary, a visit rather than a home. The painting is described as if it were a person caught in the act of being observed: looking like it was seen, half turning around, slightly apprehensive. It’s an image of attention under pressure—being looked at changes what is seen. Yet the painting has to pay attention / to what’s up ahead: a vision. So it is pulled in two directions: toward the watcher behind it and toward something future-facing. This is where the earlier time-joke deepens: time isn’t just uneven; it makes the present self-conscious, always both responding and anticipating.

When poetry dissolves, it becomes a weather that speaks

Therefore pretends the next claim is logical, but it’s more like a leap: Therefore poetry dissolves in / brilliant moisture. The phrase is sensuous and hard to pin down—poetry turning into condensation, tears, fog, gloss, varnish. Whatever the moisture is, it makes poetry less an object and more an atmosphere. And in that atmosphere, the direction of interpretation reverses: poetry reads us / to us. The speaker’s earlier desire to eliminate waste now meets an art that doesn’t tidy experience into clean joins; instead, it liquefies boundaries—between viewer and painting, reader and poem, present and what’s up ahead. The tone here becomes quietly astonished, as if the speaker has talked himself into a discovery he didn’t intend.

Too many words—yet precious: the poem’s final contradiction

The ending lands on a deliberately modest assessment: A faint notion. Too many words, / but precious. That self-critique acknowledges excess—the opposite of no waste. If there are too many words, then the poem is itself a kind of overflow, a spill. And yet it refuses to condemn that overflow; it calls it precious. This is the poem’s quiet argument against its own opening fantasy: the leftover, the extra minute that doesn’t dovetail, the surplus phrase, might be where value actually lives. The speaker seems to recognize that eliminating waste would also eliminate the very shimmer—this brilliant wetness—through which poetry can return us to ourselves.

A sharpened question: what if waste is the only honest time?

If the painting is slightly apprehensive because it’s seen, then the speaker’s claim to eliminate waste starts to sound like another way of avoiding being seen—avoiding exposure, error, excess. The poem ends by blessing what the opening tried to engineer away. So the pressure point becomes: is waste not a defect to fix, but the human evidence that time can’t be made seamless—and that art shouldn’t try?