By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"Sunrise" turns a memory of near-vanishing in 2001 into a meditation on how age reverses the order of action, speech, freedom, and death.
The poem begins with an almost comic phrase, "eating eloquently / alone in space," then lets that strangeness darken into worldly exhaustion. What changes with age is not only the body but the sequence of living: what once demanded showing up in person now gets delayed into phone calls and reconsideration. The final wish to start again feels stubborn rather than sentimental.
'Sunrise' measures a life by its reversals: in 2001 the speaker was 'not eating eloquently / alone in space' yet 'sadly sophisticated and just about gone from the world,' and where youth once put 'freedom and death' ahead of 'talk,' age inverts that order. The wry close - calling on the phone 'to places you would have shown up' - admits a shrinking of nerve while still insisting on the will 'To start again / no matter what.'