By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Song, stream, leaf, and shining disappearance gather into a brief poetics where the speaker claims no line of writing that was not already music slipping away from him.
The poem treats attention as conditional and elemental: he listens only when water is involved, and he notices the leaf only once it goes under. That gives the piece a strong sense that beauty becomes legible at the moment of submergence or loss. The last line is almost weightless, but its sadness is clear, because what shines most briefly is exactly what cannot be kept.
I did not write one second that was not a song. Never listened unless it was a stream, never cared about a leaf until it went under. Brief and shinning, they just went away from me.