Changing The Seismograph Poem by Tom Goff

Lore, shouted by ranger-hatted Dave Ashcraft
through window panes in a basalt seismograph booth:
a micro-Washington Monument stands in for Earth,
one quiverable yet obelisk-stolid shaft.
This vibrates a stiff inertial cylinder drum,
fixed to an armature of small needles sketching
gramophone-fashion along a bigger drum-etching
of what the beneath world mutters as it rumbles.
State-of-the-art in nineteen-twenty-nine.
A scroll of seismic paper, sheer glassine,
gets changed each twenty-eight hours. Just a gear-spin
rotisserie-style clicks a fresh drum down in
or lifts the last-used one up and out for study.
[Dave, confiding: ] “Where applied science is pure research,
good in itself; and to me, a thing of wonder.”
Odd, how the glassine flimsy endures as if sturdy
its paperclipped trial-by-smoking, kerosene fire
 so many Turin Shrouds, so much subsurface thunder.