Page 64
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker moves from unease into fascination, watching a woman become strange, beautiful, and almost ritualized in intimate attention.
The speaker describes bodily relief and watches the woman's changing face with wonder. The woman offers to wash the speaker and feeds the speaker fruit. I leave the underlined word unresolved and treat the final buy as a tentative reading.
The speaker watches a woman who 'is cold at first', then 'A cat - of course - intense - strange - / slinky', then polite, who offers to take him to 'the bathroom, and then I'll wash / you?' while 'My bowels spill richly all the poison / of the night'. When she lies down her 'face changes all the time', and the page ends 'she feeds me fruit she never had to buy --'.
The draft moves from wary observation to intimacy and wonder, joining sickness with tenderness and care. The chain of dashes and the unfinished last line give it the feel of memory written fast; one underlined word on the ninth line is unread, and the last word of the page is clipped at the edge.