Passage: Cross-Purposes
Cross-Purposes
What I am is built: concrete and steel. I defy gravity. I am what every athlete wants: to remain at the apex of the leap, up in the air. And yet I am useful, too: cars, trucks, people, even trains make their way across my broad back. Swallows and ospreys nest in my trusses.
What I am is motion. I am water, and I am older than anything else you know. No human built me. I am gravity’s best friend; I pool and flow wherever gravity takes me. I am the blood flowing in the runner’s chest, and I catch everything: from the hills, the mountains. It all washes down through me.
What you are is an accident, what happens to rain when rain gives in to Earth’s gravitational pull. You are some tears dribbling from a mountain’s eye, running down the pavements of small towns, into the cities, to the sea. You are the path of least resistance.
What I am is power. You, of course, have none: you are a static lump, an artifact slowly decaying. But my regal flow nourishes grasses, permits empires to rise. Those who made you will break you, in time, replacing you with yet another clumsy structure. I have seen. I know.
“Clumsy”? Being rebuilt makes me a friend of time, does it not? And it means that I have siblings—those “clumsy” structures, my sisters and brothers. We stitch across the rip you make. We are steel thread to the human needle. We bind you up. We sew you.
And I sow into you; in every cranny of your superstructure my vapors cling. They bring out your softness, your rust. Boast your best, and boast better yet. I am listening to the bright hum of the wind in your wires. Because I am, above all else, patient. I will wait for you.
ospreys: large birds
The comparison to sewing in lines 33–35 helps show that the structure
- Aenhances the beauty of the natural landscape.
- Bbrings people together more effectively than nature does.
- Cprovides clear boundaries for natural environments.
- Dserves as a means for people to overcome an obstacle created by nature
Show the answer
Correct answer: D
The answer is (D)
The question asks what the comparison in lines 33–35 shows about the structure of the poem. The speaker states, “We are steel thread to the human needle” (line 34), which illustrates that the structure (and others like it) is a tool used by humans to “bind … up” (line 35) or overcome “the rip” (line 33) that the water creates in the earth, making Option D correct.
Option A is incorrect because the language in the lines is used only to imply the flaw that the water creates—“the rip you make” (line 33).
Option B is incorrect because, while the water states that it enables “empires to rise” (lines 25), implying that it is needed for society to thrive, it never shares a purpose of bringing people together through its existence.
Option C is incorrect because the language used for sewing (“We stitch across the rip you make” [line 33]) indicates the repair of a flaw and not the establishment of boundaries.)