Untitled ("Curled across this river all is sure")
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A roaming poem of roads, kinship, and abandonment that keeps framing intimacy as something as risky as frontier movement.
The poem opens on a curved certainty - 'Curled across this river all is sure / Against the end of the earth subsquently round' - and then spends its length testing whether anything else can be that sure. Love is weighed against self ('And love is anything more important, / than you'), abandonment is named as 'a will leading toward early dying, / as scarry as it is simple', and the frame keeps widening to swallowed continents: Georgia peaches from the Smokies, 'As backward European as you can get', a moon, a vanished law. It ends on 'a cut off road in the states', a place where 'The law has gone away, / and kin can go till dawn'.
What distinguishes this work is its insistence that flight and tenderness use the same verb. 'The jumping into the wild is just endless' and 'Cut your horse, possibly an Appaloosa' set motion and severance side by side, so that loving and leaving become indistinguishable gambles against the round end of the earth. The line 'There is no language for outsides there' is the poem's quiet thesis: the lawless cut-off road resists naming, and the speaker can only gesture at it through 'Very young theaves darting at sunset' and the single dropped 'Soon'. The closing 'It is all scientific, and that's good' is darkly funny - a frontier where lawlessness gets recast as natural order. The preserved misspellings ('subsquently', 'abanding', 'scarry', 'theaves') are kept as source dialect.