Page 25

By Jack Joseph Smith

Curled along this river there is nothing surer against the end of this Earth, subsequently round A jump in the wild is Just endless, yet like a child, Appaloosa; These diamonds for foreheads breeding slip to the sandstone Off the prairie, warriors for folds, smuggling up to the trout sinks of rock; taking the lime into their nostrols, heaving as absolutely correct Saundering; then hoofs scratching gold dust off impossible slopes Verticle withers snarling back the trouble pine they have lent Off your ass you spot a causeway and begin to see shape A stance to tripping now is knowing where everything went

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The page reworks the river-and-Appaloosa imagery into a more fragmented meditation on certainty, wildness, and circular earth.

It feels like a revisionary double of the earlier river page. The handwritten substitutions make the revision visible, pushing the poem from certainty into a rough sequence of sandstone, prairie, trout sinks, and trouble pine.

Claude

A revisionary double of page 21's opening - 'Curled along this river there is nothing surer / against the end of this Earth, subsequently round' - that pushes the Appaloosa into denser equine-mineral imagery: 'These diamonds for foreheads breeding slip to the sandstone,' 'warriors for folds, / smuggling up to the trout sinks of rock,' 'taking the lime into their nostrols.' The horse climbs 'impossible slopes,' 'Verticle withers snarling back the trouble pine,' until orientation becomes the subject - 'A stance to tripping now is knowing where everything went.' Source spellings 'nostrols,' 'Saundering,' 'Verticle,' and 'causeway' are kept; handwritten substitutions were integrated and crossed-out words omitted.