Page 9
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"Kuty" watches a worker crossing a catwalk with uncanny force, turning construction labor into a lesson about risk, instability, time, and the dangerous loneliness of skill.
The poem admires Kuty, but the admiration is mixed with fear because everything depends on balance above a drop. The contrast between scaffold and catwalk matters: one is fixed, the other is always provisional, like the worker's safety itself. The handwritten insertion about the slink of time folds temporal danger into the page's visual hazards of light and shadow.
Kuty opens the construction sequence: catwalk, tray, ceiling sunk as high as you want. The refrain wish I had your job between scaffold and catwalk is given a thesis, the scaffold is in place and the other never is.