Untitled ("So what else do do I go tracking the")

By Jack Joseph Smith

So what else do do I go tracking the kids I'm on the bluff and there they are reflecting on the river, more or a creek actually, and when I saw what are you guys doing, they say trying to find two in everything, I have smoked a pipe, really have, but I say, try that one You say my joy is in death I hear you on the T.V. You think the Presedent of the United States and the boss of the local saw mill look any different, move any different It's a horror they are the same

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A bluff-side poem that ties children, television, politics, and death into one bleak continuity.

Claude

From a bluff the speaker watches the kids 'reflecting on the river, more or a / creek actually', and asks what they are doing; they answer 'trying / to find two in everything'. The poem moves from that childish quest for doubles into a flat political verdict heard 'on the T.V.' - 'my joy is in death' - and the closing claim that 'the Presedent of the / United States and the boss of / the local saw mill' are indistinguishable: 'It's a horror they are the same'.

The children's game - finding 'two in everything' - quietly seeds the poem's argument, because the adult discovery is exactly a doubling: the president and the sawmill boss collapse into one face. The doubled 'do do' in the first line makes the whole poem stumble at the outset, weariness built into the syntax. The pipe-smoking aside ('really have') and the offhand 'try that one' keep the tone laconic right up against the bleak. What unsettles is how power is localized: the abstract president is brought down to the scale of the man who runs the mill, and 'they are the same' is delivered not as analysis but as 'horror', a felt equivalence between distant authority and the boss who sets your wages.