To His Own Device

That figure in the cellarage you hear upsetting boxes

is an antic of the mind, a baroque imp cobbled

up under bulbs whose flickering perplexes night’s

impecunious craftsman, making what he makes

turn out irregular, awry, every effort botched

in its own wrong way. You belong, I said, laid out chalk-

white between a layer of tautened cotton gauze

and another of the selfsame rubbish that you are

wreaking havoc on tonight—and it didn’t disagree.

What’s more, I said, you are amiss in this ad hoc quest

for origin and purpose. Whatever destiny it is

you are meant to aspire to before you retire to

that soup-bowl of oblivion such figments as we

expect to find final rest in couldn’t possibly be

contained in these boxes. And again—no contest.

And when I was in need, I said, you raveled off

in the long-winded ploys of a winless October,

unfaithful to the one whose instincts had devised you . . .

—At this, the figure dropped the box from its hands,

turned down a dock I remembered and wept.

I followed it down there, sat beside it and wept.

Looking out on the water in time we came to see

being itself had made things fall apart this way.

We envied the simplicity implicit in sea-sponges

and similar marine life, their resistance to changes

across millennia we took to be deliberate, an art

practiced untheatrically beneath the water’s surface.

We admired the example the whole sea set, actually.

Maritime pauses flew like gulls in our exchanges.

We wondered that much longer before we had left.

Source: The Cloud Corporation (Wave Books, 2010)