By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
'Across the Street the Other Way' turns sorrowless, gloryless love into a street-level encounter with impossible desire, rain, the shed, bodily greeting, and shared sin.
The physical greeting at the end matters. The poem wants longing to be embodied from head to toes even while admitting that watching the other pass by is part of the sin.
Titled 'Across the Street the Other Way,' a street-level lyric of glimpsed, unconsummated desire. It begins by draining the encounter of large emotion - 'Say there is not a sorrow of love,' 'not a glory either' - while the speaker, 'Knowing nothing,' is caught 'Trying to make an epagram' (source spelling) and 'Listening to the last beautiful breaim' (breath). The body's plainness ('Ugly as the body is') sits beside longing that 'wants you in these places,' a chase through rain back 'to the shed,' 'Laughing again,' 'Catching the eye.' The greeting is deliberately whole-body - 'From the top of your head / to the tip of your toes / saying hello' - before the wry close names the whole act 'Our sin / Watching the other go by.' Looking, here, is both the desire and the transgression.