Page 27

By Jack Joseph Smith

Lasting This comfort, this against the way of the willow, As it sweeps its counterclock wind I have no time for the way this tree, While it doubnle turns, and drops and leaps away its leving of shadow on my soil I sing the memory of movies, drunk in two or more places As stable as siguine I am silent Songs and sparrows rest on my shoulders Yet I am the only eyes gone away Light comes down high, and dehicately held and I know it is morning I turn, and the neighbos, have not left one moment be gone This grass is soft, this barefoot walk is over coalmining stuff I am the old material one who loves, his fathers' compost I am the laborer come back to garden, now my silver spoon digs it up, and through it back, across the Northwest Terrirories to Western Pennsylvania

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The speaker returns to soil, family compost and gardening after recalling trees, films and coal country.

The willow's movement leads through silence, morning and neighbors into a barefoot walk over coalmining ground. A silver spoon becomes a garden tool, linking labor with inheritance. The route from the Northwest to Western Pennsylvania closes the poem; unresolved marginal revisions leave parts of that return provisional.

Claude

'Lasting' watches a willow that 'sweeps its counterclock wind' and drops 'its leving of shadow on my soil', while the speaker, 'As stable as siguine', feels 'Songs and sparrows rest on my shoulders'. Morning light comes 'down high, and dehicately held', and he calls himself 'the old material one who loves, / his fathers' compost', a laborer 'come back to garden' whose 'silver spoon digs it up' and sends it 'across the Northwest Terrirories / to Western Pennsylvania'.

The poem moves from a tree and a morning scene to a claim of belonging to worked ground and family. Images of coal, compost and a silver spoon join inheritance and labor. Many handwritten revisions and unplaced margin words show the ending still being worked out, and the typed and handwritten spellings are kept.