Page 40
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The narrator describes a landscape, a truck driver's distress at his daughter's escape with a boy who burns fields, and a closing claim of marriage and shooting.
The narrator places the working man's home in a wealthy community and follows his attention from the fire to his daughter. In the final couplet, a first-person speaker claims to have married her where her father put a bullet through the speaker's head. I do not treat the claim as verified biography.
'Film Memory' opens on 'the most exguisite day ever dreamed', with trees 'trunk to trunk intwined' over 'Alleghany Pennsylvania hills', wheat whose kernels move 'toward a nowhere', and a 'medow' of cows and apples, then follows a truck driver who stops below 'a Metzie's fild' red with flame and cares only for what he sees in his own home window: his daughter 'running away with joy in her streight head' with 'the boy who does the burning'. It closes on a separate couplet: 'I didn't have to much time so I married her at ten / At the same place where her father put a bullit through my head'.
The page is written like a camera script, panning from landscape to the burning field to a father's face, and it sets class against feeling: 'a working man moved to a wealthy community' who looks past 'the realistate' to his daughter's escape. The final couplet shifts abruptly into a first-person speaker whose marriage and shooting claim are stated in the same breath, a dramatic claim left without explanation.