Set in an ordinary office on an ordinary afternoon, the poem captures the moment when a workday's paperwork stops feeling like language and starts feeling like debris. The letters, which should carry meaning, "change to ash." What's left is a "black road / printed round the mind," an image of lines of text hardening into a path that circles the speaker's head rather than leading anywhere.
The speaker seems worn down and a little trapped. The title suggests a job built on columns and figures, and the poem hints at how that work can swallow a person's thoughts. The last stanza is the strangest and saddest: "no one / but the ink hunts / for a way home." It's as if the ink alone is searching for an exit, while the person has gone numb or given up looking.
The mood is quiet, gray, and weary. There's no outburst, just a calm, bleak sense of tiredness and of being lost inside routine.