By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page reduces wilderness to a lesson in passage, where people and things move on, all life changes hands, and the final welcome is tied to the stars.
It reads like a stripped companion to page 193, less armed and more resigned. Concentration and severity appear, but neither is able to hold what is already passing through. The final line gives the poem its weight, because transfer, not ownership, is the law underneath the whole scene.
Working your way out of the wilderness, into it, things and people pass, severity has no way of knowing what each let go by. All life does change hands to and from the stars.