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.
This 'My Son' gets plainspoken - 'Lets get down to the matter' - cataloguing the boy who was 'Swimming before he walked' at the 'Dormont, Pittsburgh pool.' 'The bieycle was twenty five / miles an hour,' the father admits, 'not necessarily with my permission'; he 'count[s] six of the monsters, / all beat to death way before / he was six.' The arc lands on 'Now he rides five hundred miles / at a time / Across the open roads,' presenting the man's distance as the natural extension of the child who swam before he could walk.