At the MoMA

Behind the glass they stood
shining.
An old typewriter, a metal eyelet, turned bolt,
A giant and sculptured bearing;
monuments to engineered art.
Those artifacts intrigue,
and pull my eyes from the walls
covered in paintings
of endless horizons.
My wife, who notices,
says I love the machine.
That metal eyelet lets me tie my boot,
that bearing holds the propeller,
that bolt holds the shaking tiller.
I need that boot
to grab the brown and white crags,
the propeller to sail the blue sky,
the tiller to fight the tack
across space to the endless horizon;
and the typewriter,
to do the same
for time.

by Robert Lloyd Jaffe