By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Cowboy skill, rope, heat, cold, paddle wheel, riverbank, and stubborn refusal all combine in a page that turns any wide river into a portrait of physical defiance.
This is one of the cleaner labor poems in the set. It trusts motion and tool-use to carry the character of the speaker, and the corrected title makes the river feel archetypal rather than singular.
The Wide River. Good hand, fast with a rope — good as an old cowboy. Spinning in the hands over the edge on a flat boat, spitting in the paddle wheel, chewing your jaws all the way from the banks. Strange with such immeasurable structure — never doing what you are told.