Page 91

By Jack Joseph Smith

I suppose its not strange; that I knew my elbows were spinning long before my brain And the figure eight of the Bat never touched my temple And I knew he knew I trusted in he wouldn't as he made halos into shame I'll leave that, because the preciseness of the flight was nice I don't know how dangerous a fifteen minute dance can get. But the huge ghost had now become many with their eyes closed as I swirled in the center of their round wall It was ok, And I was let to stop like the top of a tired child But The Bat didn't quit the eight, and frankly I was frightened of the windows as I backed out the latch. The next morn I came back and the Bat was gone. And the glass still theatrically dropped from the near ceiling to its sill, with old cracks sure But no new holes the blind might have made for escape or kill

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A speaker recalls a bat circling in a figure eight, a dangerous dance, and a window left cracked but not newly broken.

The page makes fear physical before it becomes thought: elbows spin before the brain, the bat turns into a ghostly many, and escape becomes a question of glass, cracks, holes, and whether violence actually happened.

Claude

A letter to Keran Sue apologizes for letters written but perhaps not sent from a messy attic writing room, the speaker in one of those places where falling-out appears at every reading point.

The letter's apology for lost correspondence - 'I simply cannot remember whether I sent them off or not' - is both the collection's most ordinary moment and its most honest description of the dissociated writing state. The garret as space of perpetual distraction and falling-out makes every poem in the collection a survivor of the same uncertainty: sent or not sent, finished or not finished.