Page 83

By Jack Joseph Smith

A gray spring day Rain good for the Garden Hard on the Hay The mill boss this morning He thin cracked a smile When he made the poem My night shift was through Steam was up Easy to face off with adue The boiler operator Who brings 7:30 to pop off With air, fire, and water The climax occured on the cat walk When the big saw roars And the carriage man nods acknowledgement I am at the top of the walk on the whistle of begin The Fireman has pulled the cord on the boilers I began It was long ago now at 10:30 P.M. Rolling through my mind is the practice of the night No, it is not right to use the word practice light The creativity of the boilers is now out of sight

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A gray spring mill poem links rain, hay, the boss's cracked smile, boiler work, a big saw on the cat walk, and the fading creativity of the boilers.

The page turns shift work into a compact ritual. Weather, steam, fire, water, saw noise, and the Fireman's cord make labor feel like a poem whose practice has already vanished from sight.

Claude

The narrator settles into the Monroe House with its twelve-foot ceilings and brass iron bed, and encounters a ghost on red wine - iron-brained, head bowed, leaning at the chandelier's shadow - who appears five times before leading him up a stave staircase to a room with an East window and the Long Tom River autumn garden below.

The ghost described as 'an eternity anatomy of reeds with an iron brain' is the collection's most formally achieved supernatural image. The physical geography of the encounter - five appearances at the chandelier, then up the stave staircase to the unlocked door that ruffled a bit to second shut - suggests the house itself as the haunting agent. The Long Tom River visible through the East window grounds the supernatural in the collection's central landscape.