Page 25

By Jack Joseph Smith

Curled along this river there is nothing surer against the end of this Earth, subsequently round A jump in the wild is Just endless, yet like a child, Appaloosa; These diamonds for foreheads breeding slip to the sandstone Off the prairie, warriors for folds, smuggling up to the trout sinks of rock; taking the lime into their nostrols, heaving as absolutely correct Saundering; then hoofs scratching gold dust off impossible slopes Verticle withers snarling back the trouble pine they have lent Off your ass you spot a causeway and begin to see shape A stance to tripping now is knowing where everything went

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The page reworks the river-and-Appaloosa imagery into a more fragmented meditation on certainty, wildness, and circular earth.

It feels like a revisionary double of the earlier river page. The handwritten substitutions make the revision visible, pushing the poem from certainty into a rough sequence of sandstone, prairie, trout sinks, and trouble pine.

Claude

A reworking of page 21's Appaloosa imagery into 'diamonds for foreheads breeding slip to the sandstone,' with 'txoutphe pine' and other OCR fractures left visible — a drafting page for the river-curled opening.