"One person can love a machine? / I did it." The poem begins as a confession, half defiant and half apologetic, and everything after it is an attempt to explain. The object of that love is a printing press: dark brown, full of gears, handing "the papers to the press" in "ever same moves." Nothing about it is conventionally beautiful, and that is the point. The speaker is drawn to rhythm, steadiness, and something that never tires.
The words she uses for it are oddly moral. The machine works "honestly non-stop," and later it "never says a lie." It is "carefree," even "a carefree snob." These are human virtues and faults lent to something that has neither, and the poem half-knows it. A man stands beside the press and "makes it control with his hand," so the machine is hardly free. The speaker sees ease where there is only operation. Her love is a projection, and words like "spectre" and "witched" push it toward enchantment. The dark evening setting, "near the shop," suits a haunting better than a factory visit.
Formally, the poem is free verse in short, uneven stanzas, with no steady metre. Rhyme turns up only occasionally, and it matters when it does: "away" and "day" in the stanza about her near-daily visits, "lie" and "cry" at the emotional peak. Each lands like a small click in a loose structure. The syntax is plain and the English often unidiomatic: "wondered eyes," "in other hand," "if I love it enough level." Whatever the reason, the effect is of someone saying something she has never said aloud. The roughness reads as sincerity rather than polish.
Questions drive the poem. "Can it turn to the human?" appears twice, and it is joined by "does it cry?" and "can I bring it back / with my pray?" The declarative lines are reserved for what she saw and did, so the questions are wishes and the statements are the world's replies. The central wish reverses an old story in which love brings a statue to life. The line that undoes it is "My spirit slowly turned to the machine." She does not humanize the press. She becomes more like it, returning "almost every day," repeating herself, watching with eyes that "are looking around worried." Meanwhile the human gaze arrives from outside: people who might think her "crazy," and a man in the park with "evil looks" that send her away "inside a pain." Her love for something that cannot look back leaves her more alone.
The turn comes after her absence. "Many days I didn't go there, I couldn't." The machine is "still in my brain," so she goes back and finds a "large building land" strewn with "Trashes, stuff that doesn't work anymore." Then, abruptly: "My God, there! Machine!" Its new state is given in two adjectives, "silent, static," which cancel every earlier word of praise, rhythm and moves above all. Her self-judgement is just as bare: "I was a miserable romantic."
The poem refuses to stop at that verdict. Rain falls, "a few drops," and she asks whether the machine is crying. She knows the answer, yet asks, and then she prays, echoing her earlier hope for "a miracle." The last image is "rain got speed." The only rhythm left is a natural one, and it drives her off: "Hopeless, I left it." The ending is quietly cruel. She loved the press, but at the end she walks away from it as everyone else evidently has.
The poem does not say why she is drawn to this particular object, and it doesn't need to. It can be read as a story about loneliness, or about obsolete things and the people who cling to them, though the text itself supplies no context beyond the scene. Its value lies in the unlikeliness of the subject and the lack of irony. A reader might expect a joke about falling for a machine, but the poem keeps its face straight, and the awkward, exposed language makes the grief believable. It asks what happens to love when nothing can answer it, and it lets the rain, not the speaker, have the last sound.