Page 360

By Jack Joseph Smith

The Temptist In the corse we know no form The belly and the heart sink We are a stone and noone thinks Tell desperate vile the other way turns ash back into life She hished up the branches The sticks under the trees The twigs that spread what your looking for It was not a search or a hunt along the bank And it was not a going away And it was not a going to It was something so much winder than that It was something we never knew

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The Temptist repeats the ash, branches, banks, and searching language, ending with something wider and stranger than a hunt or departure, something the speaker says was never known.

The corrected scan reading makes this version cleaner than the OCR suggested. The page works through negation: not search, not hunt, not going away, not going to, until the unnamed experience is left as the real subject.

Claude

A second 'The Temptist' that works almost entirely through negation. The opening numbness returns - 'The belly and the heart sink / We are a stone and noone thinks' - and the woman who 'hished up the branches' and 'twigs that spread what / your looking for.' Each line strips away a category: 'not a search / or a hunt,' 'not a going away,' 'not a going to,' until what remains is 'something / so much winder than that' and 'something / we never knew.' Where the earlier version closed on arrived knowledge, this one ends on the unknown.