Page 57
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Animal's body becomes a fixed shiplike figure, stretched between wind, sea, and the effort to draw sun back into himself.
Animal seems fixed between life and emblem here. The body is stretched into ship imagery and exposed to pure force, so survival becomes less a matter of ordinary action than of holding form against a universe that could erase him. The last movement, with the fingers trying to draw sun toward him, turns that frozen pose into a fragile attempt at life.
His skin clings 'like undying perminant flesh to the crow's nest,' face and temples 'fixed, with the blue beyond,' ankles 'like the set braces of wings.' Though 'no pulse sensed through his body,' he grips 'a stone-cold belief that he remained alive' and holds his 'sculptured position of poise,' knowing that to roll from the mast is to 'sink to the bottom of the sea.' Wind peels his hide and passes through his brain as 'pure nothingness' until his 'stiffened outstretched fingers begin to move' to draw 'the center beams of sun to him.'