Untitled ("I got an old Bonniville heare, yellow")
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A convertible-and-creek poem where rough rural pleasure, movies, and danger meet in one oddly tender brag.
A brag and a tall tale built around 'an old Bonniville heare, yellow / of course,' whose top a 'crazy son of a gun cut... off / with his blown toueh.' The reported exchange - 'now why did you go and do that' answered with 'so the movies wouldn't / be first' - frames a drive 'to where not even / young lovers go,' through deer feeding 'between the trees' and down to a creek, an outing 'sort of like / picking corn and sipping whisky.'
The poem's pride is in a beat-up convertible, the top sawed off with a blowtorch ('blown toueh') for the gnomic reason that the man wanted real life to outrun the screen - 'so the movies wouldn't / be first,' a refusal to let cinema get ahead of lived experience. The driving is a flight from sentiment, going 'to where not even / young lovers go,' deliberately past the romantic spots into emptier country. The future-tense image 'When he falls down in the desert / he will fall ontop / of one of these saplings' is darkly tender and a little ominous, imagining the man's eventual collapse cushioned by the young trees, the same trees where 'the dear rich up / between the trees and nibble / their supper.' The closing simile domesticates the whole adventure into rural pleasure, 'picking corn and sipping whisky,' work and intoxication side by side. The car being 'yellow / of course' carries an offhand pride - conspicuous, unmissable. Spellings ('heare,' 'toueh,' 'ontop,' 'dear' for deer, 'rich' for reach) are the source's and I have preserved them.