By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A brief, rain-soaked meditation on suburban Pennsylvania, where Budweiser mist and leaded window glass soften the lawns that now cover yesterday's coal mines and the stone homes of the masters' sons.
One sentence of drink and weather that opens a seam of history beneath an affluent suburb. 'It's raining on my Budweiser and I'm getting misty' while 'through my leaded window' the 'Mount Lebanon lawns can be soft over yesteryears coal-mines.' The poem's whole argument is in the word 'over': the soft lawns sit atop the mines, the comfort 'transferred from a dreaded man's time / to their masters sons homes of stone, brick and / ivy.' Sentiment and class memory bleed into each other, so the speaker's mist is both beer-buzzed and historical - the rain softening the present just enough to show what was buried to build it.