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By Jack Joseph Smith

Staying Still Once I took a dream, once a dream took me Each time I think I don't feel how it had been To try and then trough away thought is right and wrong Don't let anything go away, but it in the ground like a bandit; their searching will be ypur joy. When I went searching the desert was God, the mountains were easy, secure, lonely with love even if she was there, the sea was always nothing is next; structure with all of the above gives you art, a challenge to yourself, cause if you do only one art, still you will know all arts. If one can do all art is different, all the while, the one art leaves you always to be at home with all the rest. Going on your way is so quiet. The wonderment of lost, for the first time, how clean it is. My brillance is that I see nothing and it need not be spoken of; possibly now when consequence is seen one hundered years ahead, where as money is, This, if you have it today and don't have it tomorrow, it has no moral, it is just that traveling on is better for knowing more. If the sea skips and stings fast across the top. that is one thing, but if it is shallow enough to be turned underneath. Then that is another. as if sillness were not all a metphor

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Dreams, desert, mountains, sea, art, money, and travel all lead to the claim that knowing more requires movement rather than possession.

The speaker describes being at home with other arts through the practice of one art, then values travel for knowing more. Money has no moral when it is held today and gone tomorrow. The closing comparison distinguishes the sea's surface from what can be turned underneath; sillness in the final line is preserved without assuming that it means stillness.

Claude

'Staying Still' opens 'Once I took a dream, once a dream took me' and recalls a search in which 'the desert was God, the / mountains were easy, secure, lonely with love'. It then argues that doing 'only one art' still lets 'you will know all arts', praises 'The wonderment of lost', weighs money that you 'have it today and don't have it tomorrow', and ends on the sea skimming or being 'turned underneath', 'as if sillness were not all a metphor'.

The poem is an extended meditation in run-on prose lines, moving from landscape to a theory of art and then to money and travel. Its claim that 'traveling on is / better for knowing more' sits in tension with the title's stillness, and the last line questions whether stillness is only a figure of speech. The tone is earnest and searching, with syntax that loops back on itself.