Page 26

By Jack Joseph Smith

And Wip your horse against the ods as a cattleman of little gifts and lower your head as a plow maker, wher all the animal's and muskrats have blue eyes suncken in the mud with the old green fitted boards in repent of oak and pine and the last of the willow's wish where sorrow swells and waves shoot through the levy for the town we never paid any attention to as the reeds turn up like a million excaped convects swallowed for the last time without a visit "And I loved you. I loved the gester you made. About finding me, no matter how lost I got. And now I can not wait. I will not find you, you will not find me. We are better, We are something they never thought of. not a speck; an eye, a piece of beauty even when our fight is gone

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A handwritten 'And' opens a passage of cattleman and plowmaker imagery, drowned animals, neglected town water, and a final love speech that turns separation into a claim of shared beauty.

The handwritten additions make the page feel revised in the act of address: 'And' links it to what came before, while 'of little gifts' turns the cattleman image toward exchange and inheritance. The typed body moves through agrarian and flooded-industrial imagery before shifting into direct speech. The refusal to find or be found is absolute, but it does not end in nothingness; the closing line preserves a remnant of beauty even after the fight is gone.

Claude

A handwritten 'And' links this back to the mule-and-flood material: 'Wip your horse against the ods as a cattleman of little gifts,' the 'animal's and muskrats ... blue eyes suncken / in the mud,' 'sorrow swells and waves shoot / through the levy,' 'reeds turn up like a million / excaped convects swallowed for the last time.' It then breaks into quoted direct address: 'I loved the gester you made,' and though 'I can not wait. I will not find you,' the refusal ends not in nothing but in remnant beauty - 'an eye, a piece / of beauty even when our fight is gone.'