Page 24
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
An eerie roadside encounter with a returning carriage turns invitation, fear, and transport into a fable about being carried beyond one's own will.
The carriage keeps returning as a figure of invitation and fear: the speaker walks, waits, listens, and watches it circle back through village and meadow. Its misspelled, fairy-tale machinery turns travel into a strange consent problem, ending with a handwritten tag that feels like belated recognition.
'The Carrage' begins as a roadside fable: 'some guy say, hey are you afraid of me,' and 'you / keep on walking' while a carriage 'comes, and you don't stop it / You wait.' The voice presses - 'Well, do you want to go?' - and consent stays divided: 'It is a part of both.' The carriage 'forgot your shodow,' circles 'the medow and the village,' and returns with 'a coachmen ahead of two high horces,' the encounter dissolving into riddling syntax about 'two heaves or princes,' 'opisites, / as well as the same,' who 'distinctively / bull rack shot themselves' so that 'giving / was a kind of grazing.' A handwritten tag, 'About time and Terry,' lands like belated recognition. Source spellings 'Carrage,' 'shodow,' 'medow,' 'horces,' and 'opisites' are preserved.