GPT
A roaming poem of roads, kinship, and abandonment that keeps framing intimacy as something as risky as frontier movement.
Claude
The poem opens on a curved certainty - 'Curled across this river all is sure / Against the end of the earth subsquently round' - and then spends its length testing whether anything else can be that sure. Love is weighed against self ('And love is anything more important, / than you'), abandonment is named as 'a will leading toward early dying, / as scarry as it is simple', and the frame keeps widening to swallowed continents: 'Georgia peaches down from the Smokies', 'As backward European as you get', a moon, a vanished law. It ends on 'a cut off road in the states', a place where 'The law has gone away, / and kin can go till dawn'.
What distinguishes this work is its insistence that flight and tenderness use the same verb. 'The jumping into the wild is just endless' and 'Cut your horse, possibly an Appaloosa' set motion and severance side by side, so that loving and leaving become indistinguishable gambles against the round end of the earth. The line 'There is no language for outsides here' is the poem's quiet thesis: the lawless cut-off road resists naming, and the speaker can only gesture at it through 'Very young theaves darting at sunset' and the revised 'Soon struck with a ladies like of a Moon'. The closing 'It is all scientific, and that's good' is darkly funny - a frontier where lawlessness gets recast as natural order. The typescript's own revisions are carried into the reading - 'Smokies' typed over a struck 'and the Smokes', 'there' corrected to 'here', 'can' struck from 'as you can get', 'Soon' replacing a struck 'Later' - and the source spellings ('subsquently', 'abanding', 'scarry', 'theaves') are kept.