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' opens in self-contradiction - 'I did not care; maybe I did' - and circles the unanswered questions of who 'saw the end when it started.' After a 'kiss goodby,' the poem abruptly narrows its whole argument onto the body: 'The touch, it is the skin,' repeating 'Yes it is' until skin becomes 'More than all / that is visible,' the one proof of feeling that survives the doubt.