By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page moves from a frozen vision of the world to danger, humor, knives, truth-dragging, and eye-to-eye love, suggesting that poetry can only partly contain what a story of desire and risk really is.
The page is unruly, but its center is clear enough: love requires nerve, and talk alone never catches up to the thing itself. The restored lineation makes the movement from vision to warning much easier to follow.
'Once' begins with a vision that cannot be held - 'I saw the world stand still / Sharp in the stars / Graceful in the sun' - and the speaker's response is flight: 'I turned away and ran.' From there it argues that narrative outpaces lyric ('There is more to a story / than a poem'), yet even that is 'just dragging the truth,' which is 'fister then a knife' and 'Dangerous and down devil / as you can get.' The poem hardens into counsel - 'don't let / Anyone get in the way of love,' even when it is only 'a matter of talk,' which 'in humor is hardest' - and closes on the imperative 'eye on eye / Best looking is better.' Source wording 'fister then a knife' is kept; the OCR notes a minor overwrite around 'Watch' that adds no separate text.