By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page turns toward dominion, dream, fish, and slightness, sounding like a plea for a more elemental order of life.
The poem has a drifting, watery logic. Even where the syntax stays rough, it seems committed to escaping the larger abstractions of empire or control.
'The Tide' opens on dissolution - 'if we are dying ablon like at ties / While dominions go away as a dream' - and answers with a fisherman's plea: 'Find us fish from the waters / Where the slightest nit / Has made a stream.' Small emblems accumulate ('The cork in the bottle,' 'The split of the hare,' 'the andradite') under the instruction to 'Think always oppisite,' and the poem ends, 'When it is done,' with a brutal bit of barroom housekeeping - 'Just drag them off the bar / By the hair like girls' - keeping the source's 'ablon,' 'oppisite,' and 'andradite.'