By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Seeing is separated from mere looking here, and travel, motion, wonder, and disappearance all become part of a lesson about attention in a shifting world.
The poem keeps changing locations and modes of movement, but its real subject is perception. The scan-corrected travel lines make 'just look' feel like a difficult discipline, not a simple act.
The poem draws a line between two acts: 'Don't look; seeing is where it is at', a distinction it claims even 'old Mexico' understood. Restless displacement follows - 'I was in one place,, and then / in another,, then you just have to go / No clue with the change' - while emotions are sorted by their relation to time: 'Laughter has a looking back / Wonder has the same place'. A turn arrives when 'the automobile pulled out / And by and by walking was not normal', and the speaker, told to 'Pull it together and just look', 'did the unusual / and they were all gone'. True seeing here is a costly discipline that empties the scene of others rather than filling it.