By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"Care" moves from uncertainty about loss into the insistence that touch and skin are more real than whatever can be merely seen.
The speaker cannot settle whether care was present, but the poem keeps returning to the body as proof that something mattered. Skin becomes the place where grief and memory outlast explanation. The goodbye kiss makes the poem intimate, while the repeated "yes it is" sounds like someone arguing against numbness.
Care asks whether the loss was ever seen for what it was, then lands the whole weight of the poem on touch: the skin outlasts dream, outlasts all that is visible.