By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page stages a woman's unease with a threatening male figure, then swerves into schoolyard violence and the speaker's own odd wish to become pollen in the wind.
The poem is full of defensive postures: go inside, protect the kid, warn the aggressor, turn the body into concrete if necessary. Against that hardness comes a bizarre pastoral impulse, a desire to disperse as male pollination rather than remain trapped in confrontation. Rhubarb and family memory give the closing turn a private, almost comic tenderness.
The page opens inside a woman's unease - she thinks 'I am not relzed with him' - then swerves into schoolyard threat, the warning that if 'you mess with that kid agaim you get / you head bounced off the wall' or, outside, 'your entire body is concrete.' Against that hardening of bodies the speaker drops a strange pastoral aside, the wish 'to be a male polination / in the wind, back when rubarb was popular / in my family,' giving the close a private, almost comic tenderness sealed by 'there you see.'