Page 203
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"I can't See Rhe Coast Line Anymore" revises the earlier coast-line poem into a marked-up draft about youth, Vietnam, shared fear, and the problem of navigating by unstable signs, including a Southern Cross that becomes a clock.
The handwritten corrections make the page feel like active revision rather than a finished clean copy: hell becomes MY pocket book, the college line gains an inserted instead, and the crossed-out opening before 'what I am to do with this' is stripped away. The added opposite, still exquisite reality phrase sharpens the emotional contradiction around hard experience. The Southern Cross and North Star still turn the poem toward navigation, but the scan-backed is a clock annotation makes direction also a question of time. Its main emotional claim remains that the speaker and addressee share the same good luck with the bad.
A marked-up revision of the coast-line poem in which handwriting reworks the draft live: 'hell was MY pocket book,' and the inverted 'Collage was easy; I could play the game instead' overturns the earlier 'could not play.' The opposite companion is now bound by likeness - 'the same fear and the same courage' - 'no love at / first sight; over time, hard as hell,' with the margin sharpening it to 'opposite, still exquisite / reality.' Navigation grows unstable as 'the Southern / Cross is a clock,' 'never explaining the North Star,' before the leveling close: 'Your good luck with the bad / is the same for me.' This reading holds the handwritten layer as scan-reviewed but the page as an active draft.