By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Love, Mary, wasteland, sand, rock, mesa, and cliff all flatten into the same final scale, where human significance risks being eaten or washed away.
The verified page keeps the desert austerity intact. Devotion and walking become erosion, with distance and closeness collapsing into the same washed-away scale.
'There' turns devotion into erosion. It opens cryptically - 'With he keeps his love for you / You do not know the end of the / Virgin Mary and the footstep garden' - then withdraws the speaker's gaze in favor of sound: 'When you go and pick yourself up / as a package, I don't watch / I listen to your walking / all the way back, there in the wastland.' From there the poem flattens the human into geology: 'You will be sand on sand / Rocks will stand for you / And there will be no difference.' Distance dissolves - 'The Mesa and the cliff / Close and far away the same' - and the desert verdict lands on insignificance: 'Say we mean little / Eaten or washed away.' The kept spelling 'wastland' is preserved; the title 'There' names the indifferent place that outlasts the walker.