By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"The Window" looks through adjacent panes and sees almost nothing except the mental twist by which time and place have worn down the bodies and faces that might once have been better.
The emptiness in the windows is less visual than social, a record of attrition rather than blankness. Downtown, valleys, and other places all flatten into the same judgment once the poem imagines those lives thirty-five years earlier. Bellies and eyes become the evidence of damage, making the mind's twist inseparable from material decline.
'The Window' looks through neighboring panes and finds emptiness -- 'I see nothing... Nothing either is / what was seen' -- across 'Mostly downtown' and 'Outside valleys / and such'. The real subject is 'a twist in the mind': set the same lives 'in the same place / thirty five years ago' and 'their / bellies and their eyes / would be better', so the blank view becomes a measure of bodily and social attrition over time.