By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Compressed and elusive, the poem turns rule, speed, touch, and distance into a record of sudden change that never fully explains itself.
The page's suddenness is made from completion, rule, childhood harm, touch, county-by-county movement, highway feeling, and the edge of departure. The closing insists that what is over can also become unthought.
'Sudden' is built from double-spaced, near-rhyming couplets that keep snapping shut: 'Finished like a file,' 'Complete as a rule,' 'Done with master's vile,' 'A child dragged without a clue.' It pairs tenderness with speed - 'Kissing a gem or a stone,' 'Quiet as something fast beneath' - and measures a shared past, 'County after county was our reach,' that 'Seaming old cloth, isn't shallow talk.' The drive toward an exit is explicit: 'Still as you move toward the edge you can disimbark,' until 'After what it amounts to there is no hurry / It's over now,, and not thought about.' The poem's refusal to narrate the change enacts its own suddenness. Source spellings 'Seaming' and 'disimbark' are preserved.