By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A southern intellectual uncle, Vietnam, a lost poem and song, and a stinging universe passing by leave absence without reference and finally without comment.
The uncle is remembered as someone who spoke against expendability, and the later label of old hippy feels both affectionate and diminishing. The poem he wrote becomes one more relic in a sequence of vanished references, where song itself is lost and the universe passes without witness. The ending is severe because even pain fails to secure remembrance.
An elegy that routes itself through inheritance: a 'souther intellectual uncle' who 'gave it up for the negro' over the men 'spent like cattle / in Vietnam' is now dismissed as 'an old hippy.' His bequest is a poem, 'The difference between today and Yesterday,' and the speaker takes up its theme only to watch every fixed point dissolve - 'I lost the song,' 'There is no referance.' The closing collapses witness itself: the universe passes, 'It hurt and stung,' yet 'Finely nothing / said about it' - the dialect 'Finely' for finally leaves the pain articulate but unrecorded.