By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page renders high-wire labor as concentrated physical intelligence, where every clamp, wheel, sag, and bow is felt through the body.
The language is dense with trade vocabulary, which gives the poem its authority. It is less interested in spectacle than in the technical inwardness of someone working under the wire, reading tension, stretch, and danger through touch and peripheral sight. The result feels like a worker's hymn to precision under risk.
'Just Before The Top' renders highwire labor as concentrated physical intelligence: 'When he was fixing / the highwire he was / underneath it / Tighting the clamps,' with 'Two hands accround the wind in the cord.' The dense trade vocabulary - 'Resiming down the spudder,' 'setting / the leaver in the nitch that won't groove,' 'Peripheral reading the view / For the circumferance extream of sag and bow' - reads less as spectacle than as a worker's hymn to precision held under risk, danger known through touch and sidelong sight.