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.
Sea-coast fragment: 'How do we find them / Pretty much alone Captain', the sands of the sea filled with mush.
The poem stages a brief dialogue as if overheard from a ship's bridge, then refuses to name the object of the search. 'Whoever could get lost / And know it well, by going' is the gnomic center — the lost know themselves better than the found. The song sung at the end is 'less than ever dreamed', which keeps the poem's disappointment honest.