By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page reduces wilderness to a lesson in passage, where people and things move on, all life changes hands, and the final welcome is tied to the stars.
It reads like a stripped companion to page 193, less armed and more resigned. Concentration and severity appear, but neither is able to hold what is already passing through. The final line gives the poem its weight, because transfer, not ownership, is the law underneath the whole scene.
A stripped, more resigned companion to 'Bad Bob': getting 'out / of the wilderness' and 'into it' are 'certainly a similar / difficulty.' Here the lesson is passage, not survival skill - 'Things pass / And people do too,' and even 'serverity / has no way of knowing, / what each let go by.' The poem's law is transfer rather than ownership, and the handwritten 'YOUR WELCOME' lifts that into cosmic register: 'All life of course / does change hands' 'to and from the stars.'