By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The typed poem sounds like a collective school or social poem, while the handwritten additions keep dragging it toward a rougher, more local demand to look.
The orderly typed lines are repeatedly broken open by later speech. `Like SHOE LACES UP around his / new shoes` turns the count into a bodily image, and the restored `SEE` makes the final interruption an explicit command rather than a smooth conclusion.
A collective attrition poem fitted into the figure of a 'Tumbler': friends 'go to school / Each tri mester', and 'We try and stay atop / the one thousand that / don't get hit'. Vigilance is bodily and rough - 'Our fingers are on the count / Like SHOE LACES UP / new shoes' - as the land itself is wrenched: 'Tearing the rivers / and the tides away / and VALLEY'S AWAY / Splitting our own deserts / and bringing our mountains'. The restored handwritten 'SEE' breaks the typed voice open at the end, 'Even if we are one / Who has never been / SEE / to the other'. This reading remains provisional because substantial handwritten additions are unresolved; source case and spellings are preserved as written.