The bookend

I see you have noticed the wooden bookend on the shelf,

holding up some old odd volumes of Browning, Tennyson,

and whatever else - I have never read them,

but they do lend a certain ambience to the shop,

don't you agree? I found the wood discarded

in a forgotten corner of the timber merchant's yard.

He let me have it for free, thinking by some guile

he was sweetening a far more lucrative deal

which saw him sell me more highly valued stock.

The tree from which it came remains unknown!

He could not tell me, nor did he care,

and I have found nothing like it described in any library,

and suspect no worldly pages are made of its pulp

nor any bookcases shelved with planks of it,

such a stranger to our knowledge was this discovery.

At first its ungainly grain resisted my efforts to carve it

with a stubbornness that would exhaust the patience of most,

but finally I found it yielded once I used long-neglected tools

which lay idle and ignored in a forgotten corner of my workshop

all these years:

beloved tools with which I made my first attempts so long ago,

before the imperatives and urgencies and expedients of trade

wrought their effects upon my now hasty methods, and my success

and more frequent failures brought me to this place.

Late at night I worked upon it,

marvelling as each seam of red and yellow was revealed

in candlelight, to spur me on to morning.

The grain's knot and twist meant the design

would not suit every taste, indeed it would please few,

but it pleased me, and so this was the piece, I felt, at last,  

for which I owned the tools I had set aside in my youth,

and I decided every warp and seeming flaw, each curve

matched perfectly the only lines my implements could take:

tools I once had thought were broken were perfect for this task,

and I imagined that all my follies were in fact an accidental procession

that led me unwittingly to this brief beautiful moment of perfection.

Others have noticed it sitting there, its smooth but unpolished form

arousing curiosity in some, ridicule in most, but once in a while

a customer will coyly wait until others have left the shop

and when we are alone will awkwardly approach and ask what it costs,

and in reply I tell him I cannot part with it for all the emperor's riches.