Page 130
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
True love is defined through absurdly precise bodily recognition, ending in a half-comic, half-serious philosophical certainty before the speaker peers around the corner.
The page keeps romance material and physical exactness together: flowers, fists, feet, noses, chins, and Pascal all belong to the same thought. That combination makes love feel less ethereal than attentive, even combative. The last line turns certainty back into curiosity, as if philosophy only takes you so far before life resumes around the bend.
'Daver' defines 'the glory of true love' through comic, exacting attention rather than abstraction - knowing 'the differance / Between / A dazy / And a poppy / At a thousand yeards,' and reading two lovers by their 'fists,' 'feet,' 'long noses / and sharp chins.' Pascal is invoked as the authority who 'ment everything,' but the poem deflates its own certainty in the last line, where the speaker is 'gonna look around the corner' as if love and philosophy both give way to plain curiosity.