By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page combines quiet observation with moral pressure, but its revisions make recurrence and difficulty more central than description.
Skipping stones, outstretched damage, leaf, and return still give the page its tenderness, but the struck line and reordered ending make it feel barer and more insistent. The speaker is less interested in naming what is seen than in saying what keeps happening again, and how hard that is to bear.
An aftermath poem that begins where something ended: 'And that being the beginning of it / With Our hast sunk back / Skipping stones in the lake.' Quiet is the reward - 'Done right and it is quiet' - and the speaker prizes the concrete over the abstract, 'Better than an empirical way.' A 'She' presses at the edges: 'She could not be kept away,' 'on the farm / She will happen again.' But the consolation is withheld in the last breath, 'and it is not / that easy.' A grief or a love held in the conditional. This reading remains provisional because the page is OCR-uncertain and flagged needs-followup.