Page 442

By Jack Joseph Smith

Perfect Familiar there Quite then a possibility A start of a stream of words A music toward death We understand in sound said and played, the wonder of lovelyness Death as a child then awakening to the death of life itself, with humble care we take our way with our kind love Then sing no more and slash with out hurt And the wild winged we quit in the sky to be the animals of false gods Through the vally no reach Dislike and distaste are no courage for mountains bound

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

This 'Perfect' page turns familiarity into possibility, music, death, and love, then rejects false gods before closing on a hard valley-and-mountain image.

The scan-reviewed text reads as one sustained movement from sound into mortality. The small handwritten annotations suggest revision activity around the false-gods passage, but the typed poem remains the reliable base.

Claude

'Perfect' moves in one breath from the familiar to 'a possibility' to 'A start of a stream of words / A music toward death', treating sound and 'the wonder of lovelyness' as the road into mortality. Its hinge is 'Death as a child then awakening to the / death of life itself', met 'with humble care'. The poem then sours - the 'wild winged' quit the sky 'to be the animals of false gods' - and closes on refusal in a bare landscape: 'Dislike and distaste are no / courage for mountains bound.'