Claude
The poem opens on a hard pleasure - 'Pleased to see long friends go away' - and then meters out loss in escalating terms: 'One loss of life won't let you sway', 'the loss of innocents, / that is inapt', 'The last of the breath / Taking and taking and taking away, / until poetry is pestilence'. It moves through animal omen - 'How the crow fly's is a shorter way', 'All dogs are warm now, buzzards are earnest' - to a weary cosmic frame, 'the seasons of fire and water', closing on the throwaway 'And ain't a shoeshine in Mexico alright'.
The most self-implicating line is 'Taking and taking and taking away, / until poetry is pestilence', where the very act of elegizing loss becomes a kind of plague - the poem indicting its own appetite for grief. The repeated 'taking' enacts the depletion it names. Smith repeatedly reaches for and then discards consolation: 'loss of innocents' is dismissed as 'inapt', and the saddle-and-girth image ('It is not even a girth and saddle sure') denies even the steadying gear of a rider. The buzzards being 'earnest' and the crow's 'shorter way' read death as efficient, matter-of-fact, while 'the seasons of fire and water / Never finished and never earned' refuse any redemptive arc. The flat closing line about a shoeshine in Mexico lets the poem exhale into anticlimax, declining the grand summation its subject seems to invite. Source spellings ('Arn't', 'fly's') are preserved.