Untitled ("Curled across this river all is sure")

By Jack Joseph Smith

Curled across this river all is sure Against the end of the earth subsquently round The jumping into the wild is just endless Cut your horse, possibly an Appaloosa And love is anything more important, than you, the thought of abanding any person when they saw the change was a will leading toward early dying, as scarry as it is simple Georgia peaches down from the Smokies There is no language for outsides there As backward European as you can get Very young theaves darting at sunset Soon Base struck with a ladies like of a Moon The law has gone away, and kin can go till dawn It is all scientific, and that's good, a cut off road in the states

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A roaming poem of roads, kinship, and abandonment that keeps framing intimacy as something as risky as frontier movement.

Claude

The river provides the poem's only certainty ('all is sure'), but everything that follows — wild jumps, cut horses, Appaloosas — moves away from that surety into frontier risk. Intimacy and geography are treated as equivalent gambles: to cross a river or to trust a person both require leaving solid ground.

The Appaloosa — specific, beautiful, possibly imagined — is the poem's signature detail. It introduces a note of precise tenderness into a landscape otherwise defined by endlessness and abandonment.