Across the Street from Two Thousand and One

By Jack Joseph Smith

ACROSS THE STREET FROM THO THOUSAND AND ONE LOWER FIFTH AVENUE PITTSBURGH IN THE YEAR 1969 ’ Today The sky is still an iced grey It seems to wait There is no wind Winter is a whisper Ané color is dropping Throughsse’ Left overrlight - Yesterday A sumny street suddenly turned out of the Monongahela river wind maze Had just eas-quickly- with chemical yellow smoothness _ gone back into a glaze 4s beady eyes burned ‘with sounds ‘nd in a similiar time yet slashed ‘amey on-my-atomiccoblivion of lonely change,’ the telephone booth remains red and gray” And over-the eternity“of a day There still stands :the same = Methodist Home of stone : ALL with only roomfor young women And is it really e residences when young men must not make There“is no space for, that sleek slacked young man without a ten cent piece With his pantlegs brushed by the funnypeper winds or is any city strip simply always meant for the blackness in Pantastic: fantasy on the popping out color from:an only Dick Tracy? A penny for the thoughts from this part of the planet The private price is, in the way the penmy was picked up in front of this silent window glass Tt wes done by the 8 le cap fire plug Someone senseless with on a sure bet will again sit on its head An orange to-red primed ball to the hobo, put an octagon to the factory - mention?
Who, forge fitted its casted usage for a wrench and not on a dear ‘life for the street amusement Coming from an arse wrapped round the sculpture of a phallic bench And while a stop sign contimes its wait for the illiterate 4nd confrontation keeps busy with the bizarre city reunion That Black boy flips back my memory on the appearance of a copper-coin; for an early Santa Claus on sugar wine (Young Mister Shine'em On) Without a single policemen’s pleasure Had also, stopped looked and listened While the vacant eyed pictyre of a white on white little lady . wore pink socks crossing across the cobble brick leid iron rail ___ street car street-__ NO ONE would be able to remember her face -protestings {what came out of the walls of her rooms AS°BEING AGAINST HER Certainly her mother- informed her about being clever- To hold the percentage of her perception sustained to time would keep her life in line - Yet never to be frozen Pinally-into isolation; ‘she seemed the kini who had at least ingcribed’ 4 of the dreem-in her mini Amd the instinct of the yesterday Black boy knew It to be against’art for a face not to be traced” While he then smiled ‘to the true: Which was inside manly witness He himself was mixed up . In this new forgiveness (nothing said) I had seen him turn his shoulder's down To an okey doke turn faces turn not around And I felt confident oe Theat I had traveled with his vatchingees past our lest past A dare doom a visionary tides STANDING ON A CREEK OF CEMENT Not hard enough to break Unsure distance anymore And did thinks _should we not be ¢ tear from the top?
Dangerous in mind? ‘4 was much more dangerous on foots Appearing as just to be judged American man Appearing as just to be judged American woman And no matter ‘how long the city main sidewalk” so thin through its monolith may stretchoos It squared its millions of feet into a falling mirror- I hoped THEE BIG SUPREME JUST for HISTORY : Had not already “called® the abyss

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A long urban poem set on Lower Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh in 1969, cataloguing weather, street characters, racial encounter, gendered observation, and civic decay as the city sidewalk becomes a falling mirror in which national identity is tested and the speaker hopes the 'Big Supreme' has not already called the abyss.

The poem grounds abstraction in physical detail — a red telephone booth, a fire plug, cobblestone rail tracks, pink socks — while steadily building toward the apocalyptic fear that the city's monolith of concrete conceals a spiritual void.

Claude

The address is the argument — 2001 Lower Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, 1969 — and the poem insists that Kubrick's cosmic future is happening right now, across the street, in iced gray sky and cobblestone and a Black boy flipping a copper coin for 'an early Santa Claus on sugar wine.' Every street detail is simultaneously literal and prophetic: the Methodist Home for young women where 'young men must not make,' the fire plug someone will sit on, the sidewalk that 'squared its millions of feet / into a falling mirror.' The final invocation of 'THEE BIG SUPREME' is not religious comfort but existential dread — the fear that judgment has already been rendered and the abyss already called.

The poem's three-page sprawl mimics the city block it describes — you cannot walk through it quickly. The racial encounter at the center, where the Black boy's instinct identifies 'art' in a face that cannot be traced, is the poem's moral pivot: in a city of surfaces and mirrors, only the dispossessed still know how to read a human face.