From The Bay Window
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A quiet observational poem in which a boy with a science book chases a rabbit across a snowy hill, and the two create their own geometry of freedom before parting — the boy returning to authority, the rabbit having forgotten nothing.
Watched from a bay window, 'The boy with the science book / Chases the rabbit along the snow hill and stops.' The chase becomes a negotiation: the boy 'sits on his haunches, / and begins to bid without cunning,' while the rabbit, rather than coming 'to empty hands,' 'choses a pattern with distance in its senses.' The two 'create their own angle in the world' and then drift apart, the poem turning on a final asymmetry - 'The boy forgetting authority / Will have him return for a science book / While the rabbit has forgot nothing.'
The poem stages a brief truce between human knowledge and animal instinct, and lets the rabbit win on memory. The boy's 'science book' is the badge of an authority he must eventually 'return' to, and his momentary 'forgetting' of it is what allows the wordless geometry he and the rabbit invent; the rabbit needs no such forgetting because it 'has forgot nothing.' The bidding 'without cunning' and the rabbit's choosing 'distance' rather than 'empty hands' make the encounter mutual and unsentimental - neither tames the other. The bay window frames it as observed theater, the speaker a third party to an 'angle in the world' that closes as soon as it opens. The transcription is clean apart from a stray trailing fragment ('[yh fr / 1'), which I read as page noise rather than text; the poem itself is fully legible.