Does Slowing Down Let You See

Lyrics

Tsingy de Bemaraha.
Where the earth is a forest of stone knives.
The guides wear sandals cut from old tires.
You can't hurry here.
You learn to place your feet.

Wedged in a fissure, bone-white against the gray...
Paper. Folded into a tight square.
Felt wrong to take it, but more wrong to leave.
I unfolded it by the fire that night.
A map. Not of Madagascar. 
A map of a life.
Every street and house and field drawn by hand.
In the corner, one name: Spencer.
They called you Speedy.

But your job was watching paint dry.
ASTM D5895.
Touch-dry. Hard-dry. Through-dry. Cure.
Four hours. Eight. Twenty-four.
Under the hum of a fluorescent tube.
Does slowing all the way down...
Finally let you see?

The lab at 2:17 a.m.
The sweet, acrid smell of alkyd resin.
You'd press a finger to the test panel, gently.
Looking for the moment the skin forms.
And while you waited, you'd draw.
Mapping the places the clock had raced.
The diner booth. The train platform, 1993.
The curve in the road where the headlights failed.
Every point of impact.

You watched the paint skin over.
The moment it stopped being fluid.
Touch-dry. Hard-dry. Through-dry. Cure.
Marking the time in your logbook.
Does slowing all the way down...
Finally let you see?
What you were running from?

This stone forest grew over 200 million years.
Your whole life, a frantic thirty, forty on paper.
You brought your map of speed
to the slowest place on Earth.
Left your heart's geography
where one wrong step is the last one.
Was it a pilgrimage? Or a burial?

I'm reading your annotations in the margin.
'Here, I learned to wait.'
'Here, the clock stopped for good.'
'The bench where I saw it all clearly.'
I'm holding your stillness, Speedy Spencer.
I'm holding your question.
Does it let you see?