The largest paper-clip chain

"I like to see it lap the miles," she said;
And Dickinson referred here to a train.
She couldn't have imagined there instead
An office item in a mile-long chain
Of over fifty thousand paper clips.
But the Belle of Amherst might have been amused
And fashioned fifty thousand paper quips:
How, like their human counterparts, they're used.
Or from her solitary attic room
She'd throw this chain out, like a fragile pulley,
To draw up ordinary circumstance,
And sift through what she caught to make her name.
Just like her poetry, these clips could tally
The way that smallness makes a difference.