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