In an interview in 1971, [Galway Kinnell] had this to say about The Book of Nightmares, the superb long poem published earlier that year:

I thought of that poem as one in which I could say everything that I knew or felt…. I didn't want to let that poem go. I felt I could spend the rest of my life writing it—revising and perfecting it…. Eventually I had to force myself to get rid of it, though I knew I would feel an unsettling emptiness for a long time afterward. I hope I feel as totally consumed again.

"Wait," in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, seems written out of that very complex of feelings. One might even hear overtones of Rilke, who meant so much to Kinnell when he was writing the Nightmares, in its closing lines:

  Only wait a little and listen:
  music of hair,
  music of pain...