Untitled ("They were whispering that she,")

By Jack Joseph Smith

They were whispering that she, that would be me was not necessarily doing it, but definately looking around You carefully hunt a groundhog You check the low root outlets You know, where in the end you can snarl your way out of hell Then there is the two Like us The entrance and the exit The ones we both like the most In the middle of nowhere There can be a sandpaper On a groundhogs shore

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A strange pursuit poem in which gossip, survival, and the paired shapes of entrance and exit turn the landscape into a moral trap.

Claude

The poem begins with gossip — 'they were whispering that she' — and the comma holds the subject in suspension. The woman is defined by what others say before she can define herself.

The suspended sentence ('that she,') is the poem's most precise gesture. Gossip does not finish its sentences — it lets implication do the work.