Five short lines, one sentence, no full stop. Dave Bonta's "Convolution" is over almost before it starts, yet it keeps curling back on itself, just as its title promises. A convolution is a coil or a twist: the folds of a brain, the spiral of petals, the route of someone who has had a few too many. The poem manages to be all three at once.
On the surface, it describes the end of an evening. The speaker drinks "to chance / and to excess" so that he can "see myself / home." That purpose is odd. Drink is usually what keeps people from getting home, but here it is the means of travel, as if the speaker trusts luck to steer him. The phrase "see myself home" also splits him in two, one self escorting the other, the way a friend walks a tipsy companion to the door. There is gentle comedy in this, and some self-knowledge too, since "see myself" can also mean looking at oneself honestly.
What he is heading toward is the poem's most striking image: "her rose / of a clock." The line packs in a lot. "Her" suggests a particular person waiting, so home means a person as much as a place. The rose and the clock then fuse into one object. A rose stands for love and beauty, and it is also a flower that opens and fades quickly. A clock stands for measured time, and perhaps for a mild reproach about how late it is. Joining them suggests that going home to her means going home to tenderness and to the fact of passing time together. One could also hear an echo of a compass rose, the star-shaped diagram that helps travellers find their bearings. That is an inference, but it fits, because the clock-rose seems to be what orients the speaker. The poem never explains the image, and that is why it lingers.
The structure carries the title's idea. Look at the little word "to," which appears four times and does a different job each time. First it is a toast ("drink to chance"), then a manner ("to excess"), then a purpose ("to see myself"), and finally a direction ("home to her rose"). The same syllable keeps changing meaning as the sentence goes on, so the grammar itself wanders and doubles back, like the speaker's walk. Even the order is slightly drunk: the toast comes first and the destination arrives last, with the goal revealed only at the end of the sentence.
The rhythm is tight. Each of the first four lines has four syllables, and every line runs on into the next with no punctuation to stop it. The poem moves forward with the unsteady momentum of someone who keeps walking because stopping would be harder. Then the last line, "of a clock," has only three syllables and falls a beat short, like a missed step or a tick that comes early. It also ends on the hard, one-syllable word "clock," which shuts the poem like a door.
There is no rhyme, but sound does quiet work. "Drink," the poem's first stressed verb, and "clock," its last word, share a hard *k* ending, so the poem begins and ends with the same click in the throat. In the middle, "home" and "rose" share a long, rounded *o*, which is the sound of arrival, softer than the clipped "chance" and "excess" before it. The poem seems to relax as it nears the door.
The poem is significant for how much it does in so little space. In under twenty syllables it holds a toast, a paradox, a small joke, a love poem and a meditation on time, and it never announces any of them. Its ambiguities are productive: is the clock hers, or is it her? Is chance leading him home, or is he making the best of being lost? A reader who treats those questions as open gets more from the poem than one who tries to settle them. That is the poem's quiet trick. It sends the reader on a winding path with a single destination, and it makes the winding part of the pleasure.