Page 183
By Jack Joseph Smith
Getting old High
Someone take the boat of the water
Someone take the latter off the the ground
Someone take the bridge away
Someone take the mills
Now we sit through all of it
and it never leaves
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
GPT
The poem imagines the removal of a boat, a ladder, a bridge, and mills, yet insists that what they represent never actually leaves, turning industry and passage into permanent psychic structures.
Its plainness gives it force. The scan-supported oddities make the removals feel more handmade and local, while the ending treats disappearance as something memory cannot complete.
Claude
'Getting old High' runs an incantatory list of removals, each opening 'Someone take' - 'the boat of the water', 'the latter off the the ground', 'the bridge away', 'the mills'. The litany strips away the apparatus of work and passage, mostly industrial and riverine, only to deny that subtraction works: 'Now we sit through all of it / and it never leaves'. What is dismantled in fact persists in memory or in the body, so disappearance becomes a thing the mind cannot finish. The source phrasing ('of the water', 'the the ground') is preserved.