By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker addresses inherited mastery as a class relation built on labor, distance, and the memory of industrial Pittsburgh.
The repeated word `master` is the engine of the page. It moves from father to son, from dignity to foreignness, and from personal address to social accusation. The scan-backed `sillk sheets`, `The river man too`, the Monongahia, and the inherited father figure make the poem read like a brief reckoning with old authority and the distance between owners and the people they used.
A second-person typed poem to the heir of a master: 'Your father was the master and now you / are a master', one who is 'Foriegn' to 'us' and made money from them while 'We were your sillk sheets'. Set 'Here on the Monongahia', it ends 'It will always be a long / way back to a foriegn master'.
The poem is a short class reckoning in plain declaratives, with 'master' repeated until the word turns from rank into accusation. The river setting ties inherited wealth to local labor, and the closing line echoes the book title typed on page 033.