By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Silence, trouble, unfinished journeys, labor, and the residue of good work all come together in a poem that resists pure disappearance and ends by linking love to war once again.
The scan-verified handwritten 'if' makes the page feel conditional from the start. The hammer-and-nail image keeps the poem grounded: even when love and war recur, good work leaves a residue.
A handwritten 'if' floats over the title 'Once The Was Silence', priming the whole page as conditional. The argument moves through paradox - 'Trouble will be / the end of you / But it will not / make you old' - and through a stalled traveler's reluctance: 'I would rather wait / But I will go now', the journeys 'wound up / Never finished'. The craftsman's image supplies the one durable consolation: 'A hammer and a nail / With good work, / something always remains'. It closes by returning to the collection's recurring equation, 'Falling in love; / and falling for war', so love, labor, and combat all leave their residue.