Untitled ("The Wabash, the Snake, the Allegheny")

By Jack Joseph Smith

Must to admit, ending where we are, is shutters of old fashioned whore houses, white curtains in the wind Don't cuddle your plow boy Catch your life for you do that Our uncles from evermore Talk to us with their sticks, all along the endless rows, of cherry trees and how they look We say don't be difficult darling, and walk off into the sunrise son Ornery and delicate in conclusion Sound carries, O not to be cut off by the dark Face of hog and boil of rhine, The perception is as deceptive, as the rake to it

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A river poem that turns geography into inherited speech, where family, labor, vice, and tenderness all arrive in the same weathered voice.

Claude

Three rivers named in the opening line establish the poem's geography as a confluence — waters meeting from different directions, carrying different histories. The whorehouses with white curtains in the wind are rendered with surprising delicacy, as if vice and beauty were always adjacent in these river towns, separated only by fabric.

The imperative 'Don't cuddle your plow boy' arrives like a warning from inside the poem's own tenderness, as if the speaker had caught himself being gentle and needed to correct course.