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By Jack Joseph Smith

IN A BREATH He on the great boom takes off Pounding is a remembering mind And it bravely moves out past that flash on the line of an illusion-reality drug RUN OFF RUNNING DEAR LIKE (Meadows and flowers) Sensing being laid over moist green Seen the universe and splendor spilling through an immediate find Color the vanquished whisper of Eden Shadows reach and light pin points its miracle with a praise And in shafts the heart is made of glory through the shifts in the white cloud sky Back dropped in the transparent slightness the way camera-men like clouds to be Blue at the endless end of torrent in tunnel Transcending mountain pockets of circle rain Silence is the particle's breathing vibration as a planet spins and rips immagination's visitation into the high human Safe; with the eleventh grade instruction of Einstein

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The poem chases a breathless burst of perception in which speed, landscape, cloudlight, film imagery, and cosmic thought collapse into one exultant motion.

Its language is jagged and overloaded, but that disorder feels deliberate because everything is happening at once: takeoff, pounding memory, meadows, Eden, camera light, tunnel, rain, particle breath, and Einstein. The speaker seems to want a state where sensation and imagination fuse before ordinary thought can slow them down. Even the strange phrasing helps the effect, making wonder feel unstable, half-visionary and half-technological.

Claude

'IN A BREATH' follows a takeoff 'on the great boom' and 'an illusion-reality drug', through 'Meadows and flowers', 'the vanquished whisper of Eden', light that 'pin points / its miracle with a praise', and clouds the way 'camera-men like clouds to be', ending 'Safe;' / 'with the eleventh grade instruction of Einstein'.

The poem records a psychedelic ascent as a rush of natural and cosmic images, with silence as 'the particle's breathing vibration'. The deflating last line brings the high back to a schoolroom Einstein, a wry landing that treats the vision as both wonder and half-understood science.