Untitled ("Pleased to see long friends go away")

By Jack Joseph Smith

Pleased to see long friends go away One loss of life won't let you sway Here it is the loss of innocents, that is inapt The last of the breath Taking and taking and taking away, until poetry is pestilence Not to squirm when seen no faith Watch again when sense is flawed Arn't we accompanied on this trip It is not even a girth and saddle sure How the crow fly's is a shorter way All dogs are warm now, buzzards are earnest Just a chance is seriousness It is the seasons of fire and water Never finished and never earned And ain't a shoeshine in Mexico alright

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Loss becomes the poem's atmosphere here, but the voice keeps resisting collapse by turning grief into blunt travel wisdom.

Claude

The title's contradictory pleasure — being glad to see old friends leave — sets the poem's emotional key: relief and grief are the same response to departure. Loss of innocence is called 'inapt,' as if the concept itself were too neat for the experience, a word borrowed from a vocabulary that does not fit the life it describes.

By refusing to sentimentalize friendship or loss, the poem achieves a harder kind of honesty. The speaker has learned that survival sometimes requires watching people go without trying to stop them.