Page 255
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Happing rides bridge, cavern, sun, train, bus, thumb, deserts, and mountains into a travel vision that ends with the Holy Land, refusal, and an unguilty beloved.
The repeated crossing over bridges and down into caverns makes motion feel ritualistic, as if every route descends before it rises again. Vehicles and hitchhiking blur together with impossible images like Wheet and corn within the sun and a sexton over the rainbow, so travel becomes both literal and visionary. The handwritten additions intensify the movement toward the Holy Land, and the final refusal lands on innocence rather than betrayal.
This poem, titled Happing, moves in a restless cascade of images that pile motion upon motion: bridges, caverns, trains, buses, cars, deserts, and mountains all crowd together as if the speaker is racing through a compressed cosmology of travel and devotion. The capitalized fragments ONE CAPEFUL and LEAVING THE Holy, LAND, together with the final address to a you who is not quilty, pull the poem out of pure landscape and into something more confessional, suggesting a private reckoning with guilt, distance, and an unreachable beloved set against a mythic, almost biblical geography.