By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This is a meditation on consciousness stretching outward and then returning, searching the dark for some tiny point of meaning that might justify the effort of looking.
Restoring `in the light` clarifies the contrast between the speck and the wider field of perception. The poem reads like someone testing the limits of thought against the limits of the body.
A poem about the reach and recoil of thought. Abstraction stretches the mind to a bodily limit - 'Takes my mind out as far / as my body can let it' - and then returns it, 'Then I get it back / And we open it up / To see there / Anything to see'. The hedged verdict, 'It is always, / yet still perhaps', favors the minute over the vast: 'That speck int the dark / Rather than, / the spread of scapes / in the light'. The closing 'Where am I / Engageing it' leaves the speaker located only by the act of attention itself. Source spellings 'int' and 'Engageing' are kept as written.