To His Own Device - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

y Timothy Donnelly 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 self-same 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.
15 TIMOTHY DONNELLY | p o e t r y
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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 other like 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.
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TO HIS OWN DEVICE 16