Page 27

By Jack Joseph Smith

Lasting This comfort, this against the way the willow, As it sweeps its counterclock wind I have no time for the way this tree, While it double turns, and drops and leaps away its leving of shadow on my soil I sing the memory of movies, drunk in two or more places As stable as siguine I am silent Songs and sparrows rest on my shoulders Yet I am the only eyes gone away Light comes down high, and delicately held and I know it is morning I turn, and the neighbos, have not left one moment be gone This grass is soft, this barefoot walk is over coalmining stuff I am the old material one who loves, his fathers' compost I am the laborer come back to gardener, now my silver spoon digs it up, and through it back, across the Northwest Terrirories to Western Pennsylvania

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Willow, morning light, sparrows, movies, and coal-country ground make love feel material, local, and stubbornly enduring.

The page turns lasting into a bodily, local matter: willow, soil, sparrows, morning, grass, coalmining, compost, and labor all pull the speaker toward inherited ground. The added As it and While it make the opening motion more explicitly continuous with the willow's sweep and the tree's turning, while moment in the neighbor line makes the absence more temporal and fragile; other revisions still complicate whether the motion is return, exile, or recovery.

Claude

'Lasting' grounds endurance in a specific patch of earth: the willow that 'sweeps its counterclock wind' and drops 'its leving of shadow on my soil,' the 'Songs and sparrows' that 'rest on my shoulders' while 'I am the only eyes gone away.' Morning light 'comes down high, and delicately held,' the neighbors 'have not left one moment be gone,' and 'This grass is soft, / this barefoot walk is over coalmining stuff.' The speaker names himself 'the old material one who loves, / his fathers' compost,' 'the laborer come back to gardener' whose 'silver spoon digs it up, / and through it back, / across the Northwest Terrirories / to Western Pennsylvania.' Lasting is figured as inheritance of coal-country ground. This reading stays provisional: the page is needs-followup with uncertain margin insertions. Source spellings 'leving,' 'siguine,' 'neighbos,' and 'Terrirories' are preserved.