By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This second "Consintration" joins the missing object to Lynnie's verdict on beauty and ends by letting cancer at thirty-five stand as the blunt summary of what life charges.
The search remains impossible, but now the poem drags that impossibility fully onto the earth and into the body. Lynnie's line about paying for good looks stops sounding witty once cancer enters the frame. The result is harsh and compressed: concentration becomes the act of staring at a truth nobody wants but cannot simplify.
This second 'Consintration' keeps the vanished object -- 'It was just here / You do not ffind it' -- and the spun solar system, but pulls the search down into the body. Lynnie's verdict returns, 'that's what yo,, get for being / good looking, and don't complain, / if you have to pay for it', and the poem lands on its bluntest summary: 'going down to cancer / 'at thirty five / sums it up', turning concentration into a stare at a cost nobody wants named.