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Poems

Chapter 3: TO A STEAM ROLLER
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About This Book

A collection of concise lyric pieces that employ precise diction, striking imagery, and ironic observation to examine perception, art, and everyday life. Poems shift between playful personifications of machines and animals and sober meditations on aesthetic judgment, moral intention, and human foibles, often using concrete objects as metaphors. The speaker alternates between wit and seriousness, favoring compressed forms, unexpected juxtapositions, and careful detail to probe how language, experience, and power shape understanding.

TO A STEAM ROLLER

The illustration is nothing to you without the application. You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down into close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them.
Sparkling chips of rock are crushed down to the level of the parent block. Were not “impersonal judgment in æsthetic matters, a metaphysical impossibility,” you
might fairly achieve it. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one’s attending upon you, but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.