Untitled ("But I sware, every romantic plant")

By Jack Joseph Smith

But I sware, every romantic plant in the world comes down to the bottom of my george; the thunder of, the suck up of tears, tables as Faulkner as my Mississippi Aunt told me over candlelight. All about daylight, and how backwards the first half of the second bible has me a part of being born now, and even as a lady I say I am not yet thirty three, but he is the cross that canyons look like down here I have got to do pain again; I am the way through West Virginia, and how I speak to myself. My arms the sway of a movie,, my universe stars still in the leftover daylight. Trying in seconds To touch myself High as you get Low as welll It is with and without music

Original Scan

Page 7

AI Interpretation

GPT

A West Virginia poem of bodily sorrow and scriptural pressure, where desire and pain keep returning through landscape and memory.


Claude

The oath ('I sware') binds the speaker to every romantic plant in West Virginia, making the landscape a witness to bodily sorrow and scriptural pressure. Desire returns through terrain because the body and the land share the same vocabulary of growth and damage.

The word 'romantic' applied to a plant does double work: it names both beauty and longing, suggesting that even vegetation in this landscape carries emotional weight.