Page 23

By Jack Joseph Smith

The Gaze Your In Once far down sloped yet still close to seabound I saw the four suns silent with joy; sorrow shearing God away as well Color sliding with motion, knowing all of it is pure white, and will give nothing back The cross of light that takes you to the end. bleak and hurting, catching, capturing before your step, tieing the knot in yourself There your vision goes no further; the singularity of sight, it is watching space, beyond any throught of a sign come to you Gigantic without love while you love it The place where you can crumble before the Suns turned Moons Throwing you down like Elk in a last graciousness, a disappearing rest, some on purpose with their way, some unsure where thought has led them In a tundra where Caraboo shimmer like myths over the plain And up the passes the mountains call down, with a literal yelling would know And though this myjesity started, listened, long before time made two for love; watch like wildlife, the seperation of a kiss, is a river needed to be crossed Yes we can make that, surely we can do that, all of our heart has nothing only when we think it so And the something about love, and wastelands too, is that THEY will always be more powerful than you

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

This page expands the gaze into tundra, mountains, moons, love, and wastelands, making awe inseparable from exposure and from a broken act of listening.

The poem keeps looking outward until the landscape becomes a test of emotional scale. The restored yelling and myjesity lines add a faltering ceremonial motion before the poem turns toward love, distance, and the corrected final claim that love and wastelands exceed the speaker.

Claude

'The Gaze Your In' expands the four-suns vision into a northern landscape. After the 'cross of light that takes you to the end,' there is 'a place where you can crumble before the Suns turned Moons,' bodies 'Throwing you down like Elk in a last graciousness.' The tundra fills with mythic life - 'Caraboo shimmer like myths over the plain' - and 'the mountains call down, / with a literal yelling.' Love is figured as distance to be forded: 'the seperation of a kiss, is a river / needed to be crossed.' The poem ends humbled, 'love, and wastelands too' will 'always be more powerful than you.' This reading remains provisional because the page is OCR-uncertain and flagged needs-followup.