By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The page links coal, cars, football, the two-headed calf, and the fading Indian world in a bitter vision of American spectacle.
Its imagery is public and ceremonial, but never celebratory. What matters is how rural display, industrial glamour, and western mythology all collapse into `mindless power,` leaving the old magic only in the wives' labor and in what is being lost.
A bitter spectacle-lyric of American power. 'Shinning black coal' and 'Friday Night Touchdowns' give way to 'Flashy Buick's And Olsmobiles Through Farmlands', the recurring 'two headed calf' whose owners' eyes are 'strange in celebration of their mindless power'. The page turns elegiac at the end - 'The Last of The Indian warrior's / Their wives weaving out the endings of their magic on their lifelong Looms' - and damns the whole display as 'Traditors to the American Western movie', the old magic surviving only in the women's labor.