By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
'Also Rar' ties lightning, brown skin, age, Cherokee identity, stardust, jungle, and immigration into a rough mixed-inheritance love lyric.
The scan-corrected page keeps attraction and ancestry entangled. Its handwritten immigration line makes the warning against the extreme feel personal rather than abstract.
A draft titled 'Also Rar' (source spelling) that turns the barroom contrast inward toward ancestry and restraint. It opens with a conditional proverb - 'Lighting would not strick if it rained' (source spellings) - then sets 'Her the finest of brown' against 'Me old and falling down,' a look between them 'that jars deep canyons.' The wish to dissolve difference recurs: 'I let youth lose its differance,' 'She was so smooth as to be the same,' 'Her skin matched mine / Distant as a dream.' The poem then names the speaker's own claimed blood - 'How much I am Cherockee' (the writer's idiosyncratic spelling) - and folds it into 'Stardust to Sun, no love in the jungle.' It closes on self-warning, 'though it is not my immigration / to the extreame is not a good idea' (a handwritten line, source spelling extreame). This reading stays provisional: the page is mixed-quality with handwritten additions and ambiguity noted in metadata.