By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This `Infint` page treats infancy as a form of sound, sight, and knowledge that already touches death and truth.
The scan-reviewed text keeps the page's odd source spellings and the handwritten insertion `Through the truth`, which makes the middle of life feel corrected or interrupted by a later insistence. The page turns infant perception into a kind of primal knowledge that the beginning and end already share.
Titled 'Infint,' this treats infancy as a primal mode of perception that already touches death. The infant 'is a sound / Until two,' then 'The taking of sight,' with 'Movement is as slow / as the grace of a twig / on a high limb.' Knowledge and courage are 'complete'; 'the wide eye / is the stretch im the bark.' Its central claim equates earliest and final knowing - 'Never does the infant not know / As much as adult know im death' - so 'the middle of life / never lasts Through the truth' (the handwritten insertion) and 'the beginning / and the end don't care....' Source spellings like 'Infint' and 'im' are kept.