Page 38
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
An address to time and wind becomes a struggle against memory, spiritual abandonment, and the fear of being pulled into cold, sinful depths.
The repeated dare wind dare sounds defiant, but it also admits how vulnerable the speaker is to voices, shambles behind, and longing beyond. Silence is paradoxically loud, so the atmosphere presses on the body through cheek, ear, spine, ash, and frozen door. What burns between us is never named directly, which makes the closing sense of separation and guilt feel sharper.
An incantatory night address that opens 'Time, you have no right to my / memory' and turns on the refrain 'Dare wind dare', daring the wind to 'Resemble my agony', to 'Plead that it is you I seek / When spirit has gone away', and finally to 'Flutter me away to the floor of the deep', closing on 'Burning between us'.
The poem first wrests memory from time, then converts the wind into a presence it can taunt and confront, the fourfold 'Dare wind dare' working as a breath-setter so that the stanza gaps are where the speaker inhales. The body anchors the abstraction throughout - hand 'over my cheek', ear 'Resting / From the silence / So loud', breeze that 'does not touch my spine / With shivers of saintly darkness'. The defiance is also confession of vulnerability, since the wind is dared precisely because it threatens to drag him 'Twisted in fear of ghost beams' toward 'the shadowed ice of terrible sin'. The unnamed thing 'Burning between us' lets the whole apostrophe read as a half-erotic address to weather and absence at once, sharpened by never being identified. The line-break of the title across 'my / memory' and the de-blanked stanza spacing are kept as the scan shows them.