Page 113

By Jack Joseph Smith

And the Stevens art Is it romantic on the wing? Do birds sing? Or is there sound a shreek? A drawing down through the brain of sight As the energy's of streaming light Is its balance before or after the sun? Is it a flowing through? Or do we find ourselves upon what is true? What of a glad picture of what we thought Is rememberence clear without recall? And do we feel like we are only members of it all? Is there seperation within the beam? A thousand ideas for a thousand rays The banners of man flashing mans many ways Does color glimpse a strange day? A sucking heaving earth gone astray No Mayday to take a childs breath away Fleeting shadows a gastly gray Casting images across a moon of silver stone A reminder of our nearness to a world alone Does it matter the hell of the sword, the reason why? And a cry to fly do we feel (our hearts?) send Our souls to a transfigured bend Where beyond there is no time for a sigh God wants to send A cry to fly And the hell of the sword is the reason why

Original Scan

Page 113

AI Interpretation

GPT

A poem on Stevens art tests birdsong, shriek, light, memory, color, Mayday, sword, and transfiguration as ways of asking what art sends beyond ordinary sight.

The page resists a clean romantic reading of art. Its questions move from wing and birdsong into violent light, strange color, loneliness, and the final handwritten image of souls bent beyond time.

Claude

He pressed mountain water to his lips. Fresh water is free water.

The three-line fragment is the collection's most compressed political statement: freedom defined as access to what falls from mountains. Placed among the longer political and personal pieces, its brevity has the quality of a conclusion arrived at after a long argument - the simplest truth is the one left standing when everything else has been said.