Page 204

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.

'Any Wide River.' (the title carries a handwritten 'y' correction) builds a portrait of physical defiance out of labor and motion. The 'good hand' is 'Fast, with a rope / Good as a cowboy / And old one,' set against weather that keeps shifting - 'Changing time / Cold then hot / spinning in the hands.' The river-work turns violent and comic at once: 'Over the edge on a flat boat / Spitting in the paddle wheel / Chrusing your jaws / all the way from the banks.' The close names the river's character as the speaker's own - 'Strange with such inmeasurable structure / never doing what you are told' - so the archetypal river becomes a figure for stubborn refusal. Kept spellings 'Chrusing' and 'inmeasurable' are preserved.