Page 28

By Jack Joseph Smith

Where Life Is Wood Splitting oak and cherry for a couple old homes, even elm and madrono with it's sizemik fruit; all sections Sycamore across the continant, There in the valley, or over the ridge; space of sea or clouds, anything I was told directly, or possibly all that was ever mentioned, didn't make any diffwrance, you must know, oe need to understand, that the body is the same with a hammer in it's hands A gypsy on a train track; way below a lumberjack, a heaver with a splitting mall

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

This page makes wood, labor, landscape, and bodily knowledge part of the same rough material identity.

The poem values work not as abstraction but as texture. Trees, hammer, ridge, fruit, and track all become ways of thinking about being made of the world.

Claude

An early draft of 'Where Life Is Wood' that catalogs species as a way of cataloging the self: oak, cherry, elm, the 'madrono with it's sizemik fruit', sycamore 'across the continant'. The speaker waves off the difference between what was 'told directly' and what was merely 'mentioned' ('didn't make any diffwrance'), insisting instead on a bodily axiom - 'the body is the same with a hammer in it's hands'. It closes by stacking labor on labor, 'A gypsy on a train track; way below a lumberjack, a heaver with a splitting mall', locating worth in the position one occupies while working wood. Source spellings 'madrono', 'sizemik', 'continant', 'diffwrance', 'oe', and 'mall' are preserved.