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The speaker's self-mythology gets punctured by jail, practical incompetence, and the sense that private life is always entangled with larger systems of pursuit and exile.

The opening joke about once thinking he was Zorba the Greek collapses as soon as jail exposes a plain, almost embarrassing lack of toughness. Western Oregon and herb planting briefly offer a gentler, workable life, but that calm is interrupted by another family being wanted by the law. The sudden move to a wife crying in a Moscow studio gives the ending a displaced, political chill, as if personal drift and state pressure belong to the same world.

Opening on the question 'What do you think about Solzhenitsyn?', the poem swerves into autobiography - 'I used to think I was Zorba the Greek' until L.A. County Jail exposed that 'I didn't know how to roll cigerattes' - then Oregon herb-planting, 'another family / Was again wanted by the law', and a closing cut to a Moscow studio where 'his wife sheds tears'.

The poem refuses to answer its own highbrow prompt and instead lets the name detonate a string of American drift, which is the joke: Solzhenitsyn is invoked and then crowded out by the speaker's own deflations. The Zorba self-image is punctured by the most ordinary incompetence - not knowing how to roll a cigarette in jail - so myth keeps collapsing into the practical and embarrassing. 'It is nothing; / but youth, O American youth!' is the line that drops the register to name the real subject: heedless wandering on the wrong side of the law. The final jump to the 'Moscow studio up for leases', with a wife in tears, quietly rhymes the exile's predicament with the speaker's, two pursued lives in one world, without forcing the comparison. Source spellings 'cigerattes' and 'leases' are kept as written.