By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"The Touch" binds spiritual extremity, Pacific memory, and forbidden desire into the recognition that touching her would mean open conflict.
Heaven and hell are placed inside the body before the poem ever reaches the remembered blood and water, so the whole page feels charged from within. The contrast between blood and aqua gives the memory a terrible beauty, as if violence and peace occupy the same horizon. By the end, desire is inseparable from danger, and restraint becomes its own form of knowledge.
'The Touch' lodges extremity in the body first - 'Your brain filled / with Heaven / Your heart filled / with Hell' - before reaching the remembered Pacific, where 'blood / all over a spot' sits beside 'just aqua too,' violence and peace on one horizon. Glancing 'both ways,' the speaker knows 'I could never / lay my hand on her,' since touching her 'would be war, / as well,' so restraint becomes its own hard-won form of knowledge.