Page 51

By Jack Joseph Smith

> Right in the middle stumbling through the grass that is corn and the flowers that have wicks, shucked into two different ways to walk. Quiet; even if I didn't know Intent, the way you reach out Stretch your arm so far as to rob the place, you rested your fingers, after the she sheets in the sail, before and after the love of wer,, and the beging to come back, and when it went . to hell, didn't we show the rest, that you have got to turn around and not come back

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Standing in the middle of a field where corn, flowers, theft, sailcloth, war, love, and return all blur together, the poem concludes that some turnings require never coming back.

The grass-that-is-corn and flowers with wicks make the landscape unstable from the first line, as if beauty and ignition are already fused. Reach and robbery are treated almost as the same gesture, a stretch of desire that becomes violation. The closing reversal of the collection's usual return motif is severe: survival may now depend on refusing the comeback altogether.

Claude

Right in the middle: corn as grass, wicks as flowers, reaching across to rob the place. Don't come back is the moral.