Page 45
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The misplaced radio keeps singing while wind, sorrow, stars, sky, courthouse dread, and a final Prohibition annotation turn American life into a test of whether one can still orient oneself at all.
This version feels more stripped down and aphoristic, with the prayer set against a world where even God may be finished and the handwritten savage line complicates who is speaking. The line about waking from a dream and not finding the sky is the real crisis, because it imagines dislocation at the level of the cosmos. Walking into a courthouse on purpose becomes the poem's emblem for surrendering oneself to a hostile order, while the Prohibition addition pushes that order into explicitly legal and historical terms.
A leaner, more aphoristic 'High Watch' where the 'radio misplaced' and America's 'alot of songs' frame a wind that 'can twist, / and say God is done -- / which my savage doesn't'. The handwritten 'CAN' insists sorrow can be 'as correct, / as the stars themselves', and the closing test, that to imagine 'walking into a courthouse on purpose' is to have 'nothing to do / with the Prohibition', turns law and history into the measure of whether the speaker can still orient himself.