By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker mentions inherited gloves, mine work, wanting a case from a ship, and hiding something while imagining a search for shells. Shared physical features, wooden stock, a country song, and a brass bed lead to feeling him behind the speaker while walking.
The speaker links bodily likeness with wooden stock and shells, suggesting a weapon association. The hidden object's identity remains unspecified, and the overstruck location word remains provisional. The brass-bed image continues into the next page.
The poem says 'I wanted to get a case from a ship', 'I just stuffed it as high as you get / up in the closssit', 'And they could search my silk forever / for the shells', 'We are tight belly and long legs / high forhead', and recalls 'The perfect country song / A big brass bed'.
This typed page reworks the hidden-gun material of page 024, and the gun's 'wooden stock' is likened to the speaker and a companion. The hiding place 'closssit' is kept as typed; its second cell is an l/o overstrike, so 'coosssit' remains possible, and the poem does not name the hidden object outright.