A Critical Reading of “Bold Patience”

I wrote a poem, it developed feelings, and then it forced me to interpret them.


Bold Patience is not a poem about loss. It is a poem about arrival. A record of the instant when a simple moment becomes irreversible, when innocence folds into experience, and when a touch becomes a permanent inhabitant of the mind. The poem is divided in two, but it does not present a before-and-after of having and losing. Instead, it charts the passage from not knowing what something means to finally understanding it—a shift far more seismic than absence could ever be.

The first stanza lives in the soft immediacy of unexamined experience. A hand touches a hand, breath catches, eyelids fall, and the speaker dissolves into a glow that feels infinite. The emotions here are pure, unselfconscious, suspended. Even the fragmented declaration—
I 

    am 

            happy

—lands like an unfiltered truth spoken before the mind knows it should be careful with such truths.

Then the poem fractures itself. (He says he’s happy, Jackie.) This is not a lover interrupting the moment; it is the speaker’s own metacognition stepping onto the stage. It is the voice that breaks the fourth wall of feeling—the awareness that turns experience into something observed, examined, and therefore changed. This is the hinge upon which the poem pivots. The moment of interruption marks the precise point where the speaker’s emotional innocence ends.

The second stanza is not a lament for someone who is gone. It is the body and mind recalibrating in the aftermath of meaning. The touch is now “phantom,” not because it has been taken away, but because it has been internalized. Breath no longer catches in pleasure; it stalls in recognition. The eyes no longer close in surrender; they glaze in contemplation. The mind no longer glows—it burns, restless, alive with an understanding it can’t return from. The descending final lines—
I 

    miss  

            her
—do not mourn a vanished presence but acknowledge that the speaker’s emotional landscape has been permanently altered. The “her” is no longer just the person; it is the version of himself that existed before he knew what this connection meant.

In this way, Bold Patience becomes a quiet diagram of transformation. It is the poetic record of the instant a person becomes real to the self—when touch becomes imprint, imprint becomes memory, and memory becomes responsibility. The patience invoked by the title is not the passive waiting after someone leaves; it is the bold, active endurance required once something meaningful has entered the psyche and refuses to be unknowable.

The poem ends not in absence, but in aftermath. Not in longing for what was, but in living with what now is. It is a hymn to the small, devastating moments when emotional clarity arrives uninvited and stays forever—
a shift of light into ember,
of innocence into experience,
of presence into permanence.