By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker watches an image collapse and turns that moment into a reflection on respect, illusion, and mortality.
Even in partial form, the page is coherent. Something grand or idealized vanishes, and the speaker responds not just with disappointment but with a harder understanding of `differance` and the fragile ethics that govern human life. The closing line brings the whole page back to limits: all these dramas happen inside things that are `only mortal.`
The self before the eyes is gone, the `electric beneath stopped`, the figure is reduced to `A cocky swink`. The speaker declares he will never again love an image — a turning point in the book's mirror-gazing material.