By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"Sight and Sound" revisits the pact with blind men and turns the bank into a place where truth, God, mischief, and the unreadable smile all blur together.
This version is less interested in exposing fraud than in the unstable terms by which anyone judges what is happening. Loud and silent, truth and God, all occupy the same cramped scene without settling into order. The last advice, to look the other way and never look back, gives mischief the force of a survival tactic.
This 'Sight and Sound' keeps the 'pact / With the blind men' and the bank but dissolves the scene into unstable opposites -- 'Truth and God / Loud and silent / And mixed up' -- where judgment rests on the unreadable: 'It all depends on the smile'. The poem ends as survival counsel, 'sometimes / You look the other way / Ajd even for mischief, / never look back', giving evasion the weight of a rule.