Fishing Outside Of Time

By Jack Joseph Smith

At the sensation of the final fatal fall Before the beneath of the bog Where a fisherman boy's reel Reels his elbow into the greatness:of a Bluegill Béfore-the knowledge of Plankton This boy is a vision of grandeur While the nouveau-riche industriel science salesman Jets across the long exhaust marked sky Split second the pilot crossed’ the pond Of a lilly banked liquid mud clovered round” Bubble sucked ‘at the center however By deeply drawing reflective holes of water Where respected whirl pools twirl Their inch at the surface Will these fast silver men across the sun Passing natural cylinders swirling forces Into bottomless wells that have exits; But they are to nowhere when one gets there Will they ever come to know about death Béing at the edge’of being a child? The boy at this moment dosen't care to share Any approach of sight with the speed of light The boy's mind is too busy going down. With his feet on the ground

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A boy fishing at a pond is set against the industrial speed of jet pilots and silver men crossing the sun, making childhood absorption in nature a form of resistance to modernity's velocity and its ignorance of death.

Claude

A poem that sets a 'fisherman boy' reeling 'his elbow into the greatness of a Bluegill' against a 'nouveau-riche industriel science salesman' who 'Jets across the long exhaust marked sky.' The boy, absorbed at a 'lilly banked' pond of 'whirl pools' and 'bottomless wells that have exits,' is 'a vision of grandeur' precisely because he is going nowhere; the jet men cross the sun but 'are to nowhere when one gets there.' The poem asks 'Will they ever come to know about death / Being at the edge of being a child?' and answers by image: 'The boy's mind is too busy going down. // With his feet on the ground.'

The poem opposes two velocities - the boy's downward, gravity-bound descent into the water and the salesman's horizontal flight 'with the speed of light' - and quietly awards depth to the slow. 'Before the knowledge of Plankton' marks childhood as a pre-analytic state of immersion that mere science cannot reach, so the title's 'outside of time' is not escape but full presence. The bog's whirlpools that lead to 'bottomless wells that have exits' yet arrive 'to nowhere' make a sly point about technological motion that goes fast without going anywhere real. The final paradox - the boy 'going down' yet 'With his feet on the ground' - holds groundedness and descent together as a single way of being. The text is lightly OCR-marked ('industriel', 'dosen't'); the reading rests securely on the lines.