By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page watches children and animals together, turning farm life into a strange scene of instinct, learning, and inherited behavior.
What makes it memorable is how unsentimental it is. Brown eggs, white eggs, cats, tunnels, and the children's movements all suggest that the next life begins inside everyday barnyard habits rather than outside them.
A barnyard pastoral of feral, competent children. The three-year-old son stands 'on the fence / and jump right on top / of our only holstean', mistaking its brown patches for 'the ground' - 'Unbealiveable'. The one-year-old daughter imitates him, 'plucking all the brown eggs just / fine while smashing the write ones / to the ground'. The close opens onto something stranger and almost mythic: 'counties of cats / follow my barely infant daughter / in tunnels toward all there next lives' - instinct and reincarnation glimpsed inside ordinary farm chores, observed without sentiment.