Page 229
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"My Son" returns to swimming before walking, ruined childhood bicycles, and five-hundred-mile rides to show motion as his native condition from Pittsburgh onward.
Dormont and the Pittsburgh pool give the poem a local beginning before it accelerates into bicycles, speed, and parental unease. Counting six ruined bikes before age six makes destructiveness part of apprenticeship, not evidence against it. The five-hundred-mile rides at the end simply reveal what was already there in the child who swam before he walked.
'Lets get down to the matter': swimming before walking, Dormont Pittsburgh pool, 25 mph on a bicycle without permission. Six bike 'monsters' beat to death before he was six; now 500 miles at a time.