By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The argument moves below and above glass to claim a windowlike power older than physics, where writing contends not with life but with death beside love.
Glass and window matter because they divide seeing from being seen, yet the poem reaches for a force older than any scientific explanation of that threshold. Beginning and ending are described as self-sufficient, beyond the economy of help that shaped the Lauren sequence. The last turn is severe and beautiful: writing is not competing with lived experience but with mortality itself, and love is the only thing placed beside that contest.
The thought reaches both 'so low' and toward 'The power that is / the window', a force 'A thousand years / before physic's showed itself' where 'beginning and ending / don't need any help'. It lands on the page's hard credo: 'My writing dosen't compete / with life', it 'competes with death', set beside love -- 'There is nothing else.'