By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The page imagines love or vision as powerful enough to erase stars, class, time, and place, then rebuild them as chance, storm, stardust, and plant life reaching for light.
It is one of the more luminous pages in this run. The transformation from cosmic loss to plant trust gives it a genuine lift.
'No Sound' opens with an imperative - 'Listen' - that is immediately answered by erasure: 'I saw you and stars went away.' Encounter cancels the cosmos and the social order alike: 'Class was everything / Time and place were gone,' while 'Grace and talent were near the wind' and even the stars 'did not thrust the night / And left with all of it.' Against that emptying, the beloved returns in slow motion - 'So slow I see you coming back through / Before another storm changes you / into stardust' - so the figure is always on the edge of dispersal. The poem ends by salvaging hope from the ground up: 'Still I see you as a chance / Digging to find plant life / trust's the light.' The lift from cosmic loss to rooted, light-seeking growth is the page's whole arc; kept punctuation 'trust's the light' is preserved.