the hum of one hundred cranks
an insurmountable inertia
revolution, after revolution
knocking over
it is exhausting, but
it is not the black lung that once
coughed up grey soot on white snow in Saint Petersburg
No, it is
invisible now
except at the limit where the chimney
lifts up its
head to gasp for air
and lets out a sigh:
where the thin exhale of sorrow warps the geometry of heaven
as
she yields to the weight of weightlessness
it is not that I am ungrateful
the organ, it breathes life into
the city
it feeds our hunger
it quenches our thirst
it
dresses us in cottons and linens and polyesters
it is the apparatus
that makes it possible for us
to proclaim: “we only want what is
best”
it is just that
once the semblance of the familiar turns
foreign
the uncanny can never be unseen
it imparts forever a
double vision
of a once single-edged machine