Page 225
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The rabbit refuses the boy's palms and instead teaches him a geometry of distance, glancing stride, and lost circles, while school authority waits somewhere behind him.
The refusal to lick the boy's palms matters because the poem protects wonder from easy reward or tame contact. Boy and rabbit become moving lines whose outward forms and inward geometry create an angle the speaker treats like a fleeting theorem. The last contrast is sharp: the boy must return for the school book, while the rabbit forgets nothing and answers to no authority.
Continuation of the rabbit lyric. Outward lines and inward geometry create the angle, 'another lost circle in the world.' The boy will return only because authority wants a school book; 'the rabbit has forgot nothing.'