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The speaker's self-mythology gets punctured by jail, practical incompetence, and the sense that private life is always entangled with larger systems of pursuit and exile.

The opening joke about once thinking he was Zorba the Greek collapses as soon as jail exposes a plain, almost embarrassing lack of toughness. Western Oregon and herb planting briefly offer a gentler, workable life, but that calm is interrupted by another family being wanted by the law. The sudden move to a wife crying in a Moscow studio gives the ending a displaced, political chill, as if personal drift and state pressure belong to the same world.

Opening with the question 'What do you think about Solzhenitsyn?', the speaker recalls thinking he was 'Zorba the Greek' until the L.A. County Jail revealed 'that I didn't know how to roll cigerattes', then going to Western Oregon 'to learn how to plant herbs' before 'another family / was again wanted by the law'. It ends on a wife who 'sheds tears' and 'the Moscow studio up for lease:'.

The highbrow opening question is never answered; the name of the exiled writer instead sets off a chain of American drift, jail, and flight, so the speaker's own life becomes the reply. Grand self-images keep collapsing into small embarrassments, and 'It is nothing; / but youth, O American youth!' names the carelessness underneath. The closing cut to a weeping wife and an empty Moscow studio quietly sets the dissident's exile beside the speaker's own run from the law, and the trailing colon leaves the thought open.