Page 137

By Jack Joseph Smith

2 19 the hell, Give me reste Gone is the fire and I am only colds * picked up the telephone and dialed the operator, Would it sound like toystrange of a question operator, if I asked you what day it was? “he answered me and I said, thank yous I put the receiver down with my eyes etaring grimly before me, and walked back through the house and out the front doors The dawn was far away, but coming, I moved dun to atconk, that was now paved through Metzes field; I was watching my figure walking from the past until now. Lawns and houses had taken the place of the ghostly moving wheat of my childhood, “or many years there had been no fire on the hill in springs The wild wheat was left to die on its own now; Before me its image moved in the dawn of a tired meaning, The wheat seemed lower than when I used to run within it in the springs Syn of the sumer beating out your harshness to remind me of a forgotton harvest, My harvest was the fires So high in the spring, It orackled nicely when my finger tips sangs The wind caries itself in an earthway in the early mornings It is lingering beneath the buds of weedss I am coming closer now and + can almost see myself standing on the birth of a crawling days The wheat on the hill is still so wild in wishing thoughts, "nen I reached the top of the hill, I began walking along the ridge grabbing for thoughts of tomorrow through the remembebience of yesterdays’ I just couldn't see today as being a part of mes I wondered along seeing dreamy picturea of the girls I had brought to the Kennedy forest side of the hill, Their faces appeared between the weeds and their eyes were dripping with due, The mist was their hair and it was begining to sparkle silver in the coming suni Only a little touch, did I remembers They were so tender; They were, Surely they were in their wonder, Their eyes open

Original Scan

Page 137

AI Interpretation

GPT

After waking emptied out and cold, the narrator phones the operator to ask what day it is and then walks into the coming dawn across the old hill, where suburban lawns have replaced the wild wheat, the spring fires, and the girls once remembered in Kennedy forest.

The hangover has burned down into a numb, ghostly clarity, so the landscape itself carries the feeling the body no longer can. Childhood fire, wheat, and half-remembered girls turn the hill into a place where the past still moves, but the speaker cannot quite join the present.

Claude

Sober and walked-out, Michael reads the wheat of Metzes field as lower than when he was a child, the wild wheat left to die, and the pre-dawn girls' faces appearing between weeds with dew-dripping eyes — a mourning survey of the lost burn ground.