By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"Molly" turns thought into a discipline of attention and makes her presence the final daylight stare that hard work cannot exhaust.
The opening distinction between thinking twice and thinking once gives the poem a hard, almost ascetic intelligence. The cayons reference matters because it suggests a history the speaker cannot fully know but cannot dismiss either. By the end she becomes less a person than a sustaining orientation, a stare toward the Sum seen at the rim of effort when the day still refuses to close.
This 'Molly' opens with an ascetic rule of attention -- 'You can take a thought, / and think it twice; / or you can keep it, / and think it once' -- and grants her a history he cannot enter: 'I know she has been along cayons / I don't know what she did there, / but I know she has been there'. She becomes less a person than an orientation, 'that stare / toward the Sum', visible 'When your working hard, / and it is still daylight', urging whoever knew her to 'Take a look at the last / All the way around'.