By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Nancy Ann is bound to the speaker by desire, struggle, children, and a slanting life at sea that can bend heaven but never hell.
The page begins in mutual defense, with the couple back to back against a world of wildcats and divided kinds of desire. The handwritten continuation deepens that bond into something maritime and cosmological: they slant across the sea and even alter heaven's angle, but hell remains fixed. That asymmetry gives the love poem its hardness.
A reworked 'Nancy Ann' opening in mutual defense - 'Seductive,; in the wind,, had me,, / in that way, when back to back, / defending the yearning life we / knew; in one den after another' - against 'the sex,. of both kinds,, / of wildcats.' Their bond grins feral ('a wider / kind of smile, across our teeth') and propagates through 'the history of / our kids, who show the beast.' The handwritten continuation lifts it to maritime, cosmological scale: 'Exquisite as time / telling the surface / of the sea, we slanted / Heaven, but never slanted / hell,' an asymmetry that gives the love poem its hardness.