By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
In "Right in the middle," a field of corn, flowers, wheat, theft, sailcloth, love, and return blurs into the hard instruction to turn around and not come back.
The poem keeps converting ordinary movement into moral pressure: stumbling becomes a way of walking, reaching becomes robbery, and return becomes something dangerous. The handwritten correction to wheat sharpens the field imagery while the crossed-out word leaves a visible break in the line about love. The ending reverses the collection's repeated pull toward return by making refusal the necessary act.
'Right in the middle' dissolves a field into doubling images -- 'the grass that is corn / and the flowers that / have wheat, shucked into / two different ways to walk' -- and lets ordinary reaching turn criminal, 'Stretch your arm so far as to / rob the place'. Sailcloth, 'the love of', and 'the beging / to come back' build toward the poem's hard reversal of the collection's homing instinct: when it 'went / to hell', the lesson is 'that you have got to turn around / and not come back'.