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By Jack Joseph Smith

Film Memory It is the most exguisite day ever dreamed. The trees hang and because of a child there tops lap as mountains to the sky though they are trunk to trunk intwined there as a bounty of Alleghany Pennsylvania hills. Before Kennedy forest moves the slight wheet. The kernels are as children too, for they are forever moving toward a nowhere. The huge medow we see in the deep is not mellow, though the glow is the same as if it were. Rather this medow of a few cows and apples senses the classic. We will not understand why until we visit with sight the huge stone homes walling this great child's field to the East. We see a truck moving down a brick street old as cobblestone, street. The driver slams it still. We raise our eyes now for the smoke across the sky. It drifts full as if the wind was made. We know the wind is an athist, but all that is a curtain must open to some thing. He stammers, this truck driving man grits, below a Metzie's fild he can not see red now with flame. But it is not the silk seed of grain for which he cares. And not even the realistate he comrehends through these momentary clouds of pain (however important.) It is rather what he sees in his own home window that brings his stammer down from vigor to stress. He is obviously a working man moved to a wealthy community, and his young daughter is laughing higher than him and the fire with, certainly not about or for, She is running away with joy in her streight head and he knows she is over the crest of excape with the boy who does the burning. 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

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

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.


Claude

'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.