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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

A speaker returns to a bar looking for a troubled woman and is forced to face his own helplessness instead of any clean rescue story.

The poem moves through a grim social interior of bartenders, mirrors, "hag men," and "blue frozen veined women," making the search feel crowded but hopeless. Its sharpest turn comes when the speaker catches his own reflected face and stops himself from asking about "binge and rebirth," as if even concern can slip into performance or voyeurism. The closing lines land on a bitter wish that she has gone somewhere "better for her," which is the closest thing to mercy the poem allows.

Claude

Continuing the bar story, the speaker admits he 'was just reading to the downcast / Slumming my mind into the drunken faithful', gives the woman 'the hard bound collection', and returns a week later to ask 'the bartending man / through the vast mirrored back of his head' whether she has been back, only to see his own face 'Slammed home' in the mirror 'of a child in the death wing of a zoo'.

The poem turns the rescuer's story against the speaker: the mirrors that line the bar expose his 'Jimmy Cagney fingered' pose and his literary charity as a kind of slumming. The quoted replies imagine her in a 'tenement hotel' that 'beats the flophouse by a dollar!', and the closing lines concede that anywhere is 'definitely better for her / Than a kid like you', a bitter mercy that removes the speaker from her story.