The Old Way

By Jack Joseph Smith

There I saw Geronimo save me from the fire When I was a child picking up a totem pole Over and down in Apache territory tem tops the sand Waist nothing when you stand across the sand Says Che
waist nothing when you stand across this sand waist noting when you see all is so lush waist noting when you see across the concrete waist noting when ocean's wild and flapping the jig Happy now we are saved not lost And a penny saved is a penny earned
Ten years old tops Over and down in Apache territory There I saw Geronimo save me from the fire When I was a child picking up a totem pole Waist nothing of your thought Che on the cliff The sand and the lushness The concrete and the sloneness Are so flapping and wild A body jib to swirl and turn out in measure Never saved always lost with youth A penny earned is a very long dream Is there romantic and depossed is true I live in a city were there still are a few stepping stones and all the way from the country how good those streets are for the heart

Original Scan

Page 15
Page 16
Page 17

AI Interpretation

GPT

This three-page sequence mixes Apache landscape, Geronimo memory, childhood vision, and urban afterlife into a rough meditation on what survives and what is lost.

Even with fragmentary wording, the through-line is strong: sand, cliff, lushness, concrete, youth, and city streets all belong to one argument about inheritance. The poem keeps testing whether an older frontier or spiritual intensity can still be felt inside modern life, and the answer is unstable but not empty.

Claude

Three pages that read as successive drafts of one poem, so the work shows its own making. The first page plants the images - 'Geronimo save me from the fire', the 'totem pole', 'Apache territory', and 'Che'; the second turns them into an incantation, the repeated 'waist nothing / waist noting' (Jack's spelling, midway between 'waste' and 'waist') chanted across sand, lushness, and concrete before landing on the borrowed proverb 'a penny saved / is a penny earned'. The third page compresses the chant and arrives at the destination: 'I live in a city were there still / are a few stepping stones'. Across the pagebreaks the poem asks how much frontier and childhood survive the move into the city, and answers small but intact - a few stones, a reborn proverb ('A penny earned is a very long dream'), streets that are 'good ... for the heart'. This reading stays partly provisional: the transcription band is mixed and several lines ('the sloneness', 'A body jib') sit on uncertain wording.