Untitled ("It is with and without music")

By Jack Joseph Smith

The dog has not left the front porch Worried, not set inside the front door There is not a stoop here Just wooden lifts And lonelyness Our dog knows as well as I YA' can not hunt When there is something wrong with the way the bells ring Hey, I search for a voice And I am the saint in the revirbation

Original Scan

Page 5

AI Interpretation

GPT

A spare porch poem where animal alertness, loneliness, and spiritual listening all meet in one uneasy domestic stillness.


Claude

With and without music simultaneously — the porch where sound and silence are not opposites but textures of the same stillness. Animal alertness, loneliness, and spiritual listening all meet at this threshold between domesticity and the wild.

The 'with and without' construction refuses to choose, which is the poem's method throughout. Presence and absence coexist without resolving.