By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page ties domestic labor and animal care to anger, exhaustion, and the lonely repetition of checking on children after dark.
The voice is blunt and unprotected. Milking, sunset, the fence, the house shack, and midnight all stay rooted in work and routine, but the emotional charge comes from how that routine has hardened into resentment and fatigue.
Five short lines and then the farm count — `the eleventh Time / I had lifed my eyes / counting checking the kids` — placing midnight as the moment the count lands. The oily Holstein and the `rotten bastards` recur across the collection like a refrain.