By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A fragmentary urban travel scene turns into a wary approach to ridicule, money, and the small relief of making it home.
The city and country are held together like a brace, suggesting support that also feels restrictive. Cobblestone, highway, tavern, park, and a dead swimming pool create a landscape of exhaustion and leftover public space. The poem centers on exposure: the speaker moves toward being kidded like a modern soldier while others profit in his absence, so the ride home feels less triumphant than narrowly salvaged.
Titled 'TIRED...', a night-road homecoming where the speaker, with 'the city and the country both as a brace', travels 'from midnight interior to highway' past 'a tavern along a park / Off a dead swimming pool', braced 'To be kidded like a modern soldier' by people who 'have made' money 'While I was gone', and ends 'How lucky to get a ride home-'.
The poem catches a precise species of return: the veteran-shaped homecoming where the locals profited in your absence and greet you as a punchline, 'kidded like a modern soldier'. The brace metaphor cuts both ways - city and country hold the speaker up but also clamp him - and the exhausted landscape of cobblestone, highway, and 'a dead swimming pool' renders public space as leftover and drained. The title's trailing dots set the whole fragment under a sign of fatigue. The surprise is the close: 'How lucky to get a ride home-' is almost grateful rather than bitter, the speaker accepting the ribbing as the price of arrival. The source line-end hyphens after 'soldier', 'made', and 'home' are kept as the scan shows them.