Page 59

By Jack Joseph Smith

Here For A Moment Here inside of brick faces, structures and streets During a place named Mount Lebanon for Cedar trees That I can't find through the strange locusts, of Western Pennsylvania Here I don't speak of literature But I can't blame the problem on the voices, or their silence Just the less and less Of all that's been read Like classic ideas and deeds, in the eyes of pennyless pockets As a spirit with only sign language left for my hands My body is not the wind that finds the horse in any land Rather a time zone has me in the consumptive That holds flowers, and sheds air About Pittsburgh steel back from 1981 I can remember the work it took To make what seems to be broken And while thinking breeze in humid August stillness I can recall both river boat and country club Now instead of the traditional design intended Duely I will write my memory into dust Like a worker who disreguards lunch with a pail of booze, or even the notion of turning household slang into lust.

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Set in western Pennsylvania, the poem turns local memory of steel, labor, and decline into a meditation on speech, class, and the fading weight of what has been read and built.

The speaker places himself among brick, streets, cedar names, locusts, and old industry, grounding thought in a specific region rather than in literary abstraction. What has been inherited feels diminished, whether books, work, or civic form, and the body itself seems caught in a worn economic climate. Writing becomes a dusty labor of memory, closer to surviving and recording than to refinement.

Claude

'Here For A Moment': set 'inside of brick faces, structures and streets' in 'Mount Lebanon for Cedar trees' and 'Western Pennsylvania', the speaker, 'a spirit with only sign language left for my hands', recalls 'Pittsburgh steel back from 1981' and resolves 'Duely I will write my memory into dust'.

The poem grounds thought in a named region rather than literary abstraction - 'Here I don't speak of literature' - and lets place carry the loss. Inheritance has thinned to 'the less and less / Of all that's been read', and the body itself is dispossessed: 'My body is not the wind that finds the horse in any land / Rather a time zone has me in the consumptive'. The speaker becomes a coordinate, not a creature. 'Pittsburgh steel back from 1981' dates the decline precisely and keeps the elegy out of easy nostalgia. The closing labor-image, writing 'memory into dust' 'Like a worker who disreguards lunch with a pail of booze', makes composition a worker's grim task rather than refinement. Source spellings 'pennyless' and 'disreguards' are preserved as written.