Page 37

By Jack Joseph Smith

I could say that (I was talking about killing in herself what was killing her) but I wasn't I was just reading to the downcast Slumming my mind into the drunken faithful Until I gave her the hard bound collection and walked like a wrinkled Wasp out the door A week later I dear one returned Dayturned distant from fresh shower and shave but shoulder cover tucked into my Seersucker usual, I went again into the dim lit red blues Among the American lower classes Fiction Hall of Hell Evading with peripheral vision I asked the bartending man through the vast mirrored back of his head if the woman had since then been there As I Carnival like could see a 180 degree of hag men and blue frozen veined women shake their heads in the oval of no Nowhere to be found... on the questioned gesture of my Jimmy Cagney fingered spread Then the streek of my face right on right eye teeth Across a mamouth mirrors fingernailed valley of dust: Slammed home my image in profile of a child in the death wing of a zoo As I caught my act in time not to ask about binge and rebirth taking two weeks Hopefully on the lam she was lucky with the second half And do the eyes of the dispossessed answer? "To a tenement hotel, mister socialworker star." "That beats the flophouse by a dollar!" "Grateful to sell her inside story." "On the cover of that Saroyan" (yes you were after) -To somebody lesser, or somebody greater- But definitely better for her Than a kid like you

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The return to the bar exposes the speaker's vanity in trying to rescue someone through literature and leaves him with guilt, class shame, and self-disgust.

He insists he was not speaking literally about killing, but that defense already reveals how unstable the earlier encounter was. The search for the woman becomes a humiliating performance reflected back at him in mirrors, until he sees himself like a child in the death wing of a zoo. By the end, the poem cuts hard at the fantasy of being a benefactor, suggesting she was better off with almost anyone other than a young man staging concern.

Claude

Continuing the bar story, the speaker admits 'I was just reading to the downcast / Slumming my mind into the drunken faithful', gives the woman 'the hard bound collection', and a week later returns in his 'Seersucker usual' to ask the bartender about her, only to see patrons 'shake their heads in the oval of no' and his own reflection 'of a child in the death wing of a zoo'. Imagined replies mock him as 'mister socialworker star' and conclude she is 'definitely better for her / Than a kid like you'.

The would-be rescuer becomes the target: his literary charity is exposed as slumming, and the bar's mirrors turn his search into a humiliating performance. He catches himself 'in time / not to ask about binge and rebirth', a small moment of self-awareness that deepens the embarrassment rather than relieving it. The quoted voices of the dispossessed deliver the verdict with cold humor, and the isolated last line lands the self-judgment.