By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The fragment turns seafaring guidance into a meditation on uncertainty, haste, and getting lost.
Its scattered commands and replies sound like voices trying to orient themselves after the fact: captain, son, saintly mush, sands of the sea. The wording is clearly broken in places, but what survives points toward a hard lesson that songs and sayings cannot master distance or loss. Ocean describe me not is the sharpest refusal, pushing back against being swallowed by vastness or easy metaphor.
'Reaving up from the shore': a clipped sea-dialogue - 'How do we find them / Pretty mich alone Captain / It was against all odds' - turning to 'Ocean discribe me not', 'Whoever could get lost / And know it well, by going', and a song 'sung / Less than ever dreamed'.
The poem overhears voices trying to orient themselves after the fact - captain, son, 'saintly all are in mush / all along the sands of the sea' - and never names what is being searched for. The wording is broken in places, but the surviving lines point to a lesson that 'songs' and sayings cannot master distance or loss. 'Ocean discribe me not' is the sharpest refusal, pushing back against being swallowed by vastness or easy metaphor. The gnomic center, 'Whoever could get lost / And know it well, by going', proposes that the lost know themselves better than the found - knowledge earned by departure. The closing song 'Less than ever dreamed' keeps the poem's disappointment honest. Source spellings 'mich' and 'discribe' are preserved as written.