By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker remembers beauty, humor and pain with a young woman. She says she knows the promise never to give her up is sincere, and the speaker wonders how that could be.
The closing guesses about being clean and having made it remain the speaker's own claims; the poem supplies no independent account of the relationship.
'The Cross of Time': 'I saw beauty / I saw beauty stay', 'I told her that I would never give her up / And she said / I know you mean it', ending 'I guess I am clean / I guess I have made it'.
A love poem that ends in cautious relief.