Page 31
By Jack Joseph Smith
When I arrived in EL PASO and
was walking across the Bridge
to W I stopped yelling
inside, and there would of
coourse be no crying; there
I did not suppose, and I did
not sense, I simply knew
I was gone.
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
GPT
Crossing into El Paso becomes a moment of inward severance, where the speaker stops yelling and recognizes he is already gone.
Even in fragmentary form, the page has a decisive emotional arc. The bridge is both literal and psychic, and the point of the passage is not arrival but the quiet certainty that some earlier self has already been left behind.
Claude
A handwritten page of inward severance. 'When I arrived in EL PASO and was walking across the Bridge', with a wide gap before 'I stopped yelling inside', the speaker arrives at certainty stripped of feeling: 'there would of course be no crying... I did not suppose, and I did not sense, I simply knew I was gone.' The poem's force is in that final flat knowledge - not arrival but the recognition that an earlier self has already been left behind. The deliberate mid-line gap is preserved as in the manuscript.