Elegies for Machines That Still Run
A sequence of poems for objects not yet gone, but going.
An elegy usually waits for the death. These were written for machines that still work, on the theory that grief can start early and be no less true for it.
The rotary phone still dials, badly, on a line that will not exist much longer. The dishwasher, twenty years old, still runs, though every part in it has been replaced at least once.
These poems are written for both, in the present tense, refusing the past tense their obsolescence seems to invite - because they are not gone yet, and an elegy written too early might be the only honest kind.
I do not know if a machine can be mourned the way a person can. I have decided, for the length of these poems at least, to act as if it can.
