Page 17
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker calls a woman too straight to bend, recalls a Pacific moment and says he belongs to her as blood rather than as a boyfriend.
The speaker joins remembered water with bodily kinship and a woman who could come to him in death. The writer addresses knowledge in the title, but the page does not settle whether the woman and that address name the same subject.
'Dear Knowledge' opens with a handwritten line 'ShE is to strEight for mE to BEnd / hEr,' and describes a woman as a song 'that goes into your heart', saying 'I am not her boyfriend, I am her blood', and ends 'I can still see you twice,'.
The poem treats knowledge as a person who cannot be bent, and holds the speaker's devotion against time; blacked-out words at the end are omitted.