My Friend Pascal

By Jack Joseph Smith

Michael long ago Perhaps it was sixteen sixty six But then he would have been two. when you knew me and I knew you A sophisticated wildness Your courtyard, a window through which one looked Hands as waves; a finger point as a jib Sailor's skimming and skirting, their mannor, and there still, I would see your serious smile Though so far away These are times I realize as close up as back then, as a distinguished reality
Now the damage of my adventure Has me torn from time With a vision always unaccomplished My juristiction having me no more, than standing upright Remembering so long ago, truth is that which is so My friend Pascal

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A poem of friendship and distance that merges memory, seafaring imagery, loss, and the strain of carrying a damaged life forward.

The poem feels like it is trying to keep someone present through fragments of style, gesture, and remembered intensity.

Claude

An elegiac address to 'Michael long ago', playfully dated 'sixteen sixty six' ('But then he would have been two'), recalling 'A sophisticated wildness', a 'courtyard', and 'your serious smile / Though so far away'. The speaker, now 'torn from time / With a vision always unaccomplished' and reduced to 'no more, / than standing upright', closes by affirming 'truth is that which is so / My friend Pascal'.

The poem fuses a remembered friend, Michael, with the philosopher Pascal, so that intimacy and intellect share one address; the mock-historical date '1666' and the quip about his being 'two' set a tender, joking register against the loss underneath. Its imagery is nautical and gestural - 'Hands as waves; a finger point / as a jib', 'Sailor's skimming and skirting, / their mannor' - rendering memory as motion across distance, the friend always 'so far away' yet seen 'as close up as back then'. The turn to the present is the wound: 'the damage of my adventure / Has me torn from time', 'My juristiction having me no more, / than standing upright' - a confession of diminished capacity. The Pascalian closing, 'truth is that which is so', anchors the elegy in a plain epistemology, naming the friend as a touchstone for the real. Preserve source spellings 'mannor' and 'juristiction'.