Page 203

By Jack Joseph Smith

("He by, Yorn piptt . T can‘*t See ihe Coast Line Anymore I was youngs hell was iw pocket book Collage was easy; I could play the game /bif ead So I went to ata and stayed there It is unusual to run into someone who has the same fear and the same courage Not immediate by any means, no love at first sight; over time, hard as hell; U/. e 3 onris BIE, All Ayguisil: going what I am to do with this, the “~ pe my same rivers, a few mountains, a desert or two, all about a sea and one huge ocean,. barely out of childhood, and tossing your life to je most of thos troubbled winds, frowns Southern ¢ js BedocoH Pp lo oF Cross, never explaining the North Star, Your good luck with the bad is the same for me

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

"I can't See the Coast Line Anymore" turns youth, travel, and a difficult attachment into a navigation poem governed by fear, courage, and bad luck shared between two people.

Hell in the pocketbook and easy college set up a young self who knew how to perform before leaving for Asia and losing familiar bearings. The relationship described here is slow and punishing rather than romantic in any easy way, built from matching fear as much as matching courage. Southern Cross and North Star matter because the poem is about reorientation: the old coordinates no longer explain the life being lived.

Claude

Revision of 201 with garbled OCR fragments; 'Collage was easy; I could play the game' inverts the earlier 'could not play,' and the piece closes on a shared Southern-Cross luck that binds speaker and addressee.