Page 24

By Jack Joseph Smith

We were young not knowing or caring about the differance between the weeds and the grass the stumps and the saplings and trees for hiding game or making heat while we licked the watershed and got sick and went right back and did it again and sulfer tough is good as the way the winds blow over the top, and in the old days you brought a stone home to show where you had been when you like everything underneath and love everything above and we said spish when the wind twisted as if we had done it ourselves and it is not just nature you know when the trees wine and stretch for embrace from the very honest and the very crul works of coal and at first I thought there were gutar's in the sky while the silence was so true in the watershed as if the murmer was some kind of prayer we had heard so oftem not knowing the river had decided to change its way and run some of it's way abrest the cliffs

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Childhood in the watershed appears as sickness, delight, weather, coal, prayer, and a river secretly changing course through the cliffs.

The poem remembers a time before categorical thinking, when weeds and grass, stumps and saplings, danger and play all ran together. That innocence is not pure, because sulfur, coal, and bodily sickness are already part of the pleasure. The guitars in the sky and the murmured prayer make the watershed feel musically alive just as the river quietly alters its own path.

Claude

One long unbroken stanza of childhood that knew no categories - 'not knowing or caring about / the differance between the weeds and the grass' - where the children 'licked the watershed / and got sick and went right back and did it / again.' The old stone-home custom recurs, and the woods seem to speak: 'the trees wine / and stretch for embrace,' 'I thought there / were gutar's in the sky,' the silence 'as if the murmer was some kind of / prayer.' It ends with nature quietly altering itself, 'the river / had decided to change its way and run ... abrest the cliffs.'