Page 90

By Jack Joseph Smith

I could say that (I was talking about killing in herself what was killing her) but I wasn't I was just reading to the downcast Slimming my mind into the drunken faithful Until I gave her the hard bound collection and walked like a wrinkled Wasp out the door A week later I dear one returned Dayturned distant from fresh shower and shave- but shoulder cover tucked into my Seersucker usual, I went again into the dim lit red blues Among the American lower classes Fiction Hall of Hell Evading with peripheral vision I asked the bartending man through the vest mirrored back of his head if the woman had since then been there- As I Carnival like could see a 180 degree of hag men and blue frozen veined women shake their heads in the oval of no Nowhere-to-be found... on the questioned gesture of my Jimmy-Cagney-fingered spread Then the streek of my face right on right eye teeth Across a mammouth mirrors fingernailed valley of dusts Slammed home my image in profile of a child in the death wing of a zoo As I caught my act in time not to ask about binge and rebirth. taking two weeks- Hopefully on the lam she was lucky with the second half And do the eyes of the dispossessed answer? "To a tenement hotel, mister socialworker star." "That beats the flophouse by a dollar!" "Grateful to sell her inside story." "On the cover of that Saroyan" (yes you were after) -To somebody lesser, or somebody greater- But definitely better for her Then a kid like you

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A speaker returns to a bar looking for a troubled woman and is forced to face his own helplessness instead of any clean rescue story.

The poem moves through a grim social interior of bartenders, mirrors, "hag men," and "blue frozen veined women," making the search feel crowded but hopeless. Its sharpest turn comes when the speaker catches his own reflected face and stops himself from asking about "binge and rebirth," as if even concern can slip into performance or voyeurism. The closing lines land on a bitter wish that she has gone somewhere "better for her," which is the closest thing to mercy the poem allows.

Claude

Continuation of the bar memory: 'I was just reading to the downcast / Slimming my mind into the drunken faithful', returning a week later in his 'Seersucker usual' to the 'Fiction Hall of Hell', asking the bartender after the vanished woman, catching his own face in 'a mammouth mirrors fingernailed valley of dusts' as 'a child in the death wing of a zoo', hoping she was 'definitely better for her / Then a kid like you'.

The speaker returns to look for the troubled woman and is forced to confront his own helplessness instead of any clean rescue. The social interior is grim and crowded - 'hag men and blue frozen veined women / shake their heads in the oval of no' - and the search dead-ends in mirrors. The sharpest turn is self-recognition: he catches his reflected face 'in time / not to ask about binge and rebirth', stopping himself before concern curdles into voyeurism, his own image reduced to 'a child in the death wing of a zoo'. The quoted overheard lines ('To a tenement hotel, mister socialworker star', 'On the cover of that Saroyan') tie his literary self-image to her ruin. The closing wish that she went somewhere 'better for her / Then a kid like you' is the nearest thing to mercy the poem allows, and a final self-verdict that he was unfit for the rescue. Source spelling 'mammouth' is preserved as written.