Page 73

By Jack Joseph Smith

ACROSS THE STREET FROM TWO THOUSAND AND ONE PITTSBURGH IY THE YEAR © 1969 Today The sky is still 4n iced grey It seems ‘to weit There is no wind Winter is a whisper And color is dropping Throughsee: Left over-light Yesterday A sumny street suddenly turned out of the Monongehela river wind maze Had just as quickly: with chemical yellow smoothness _ gone back into a glaze fs beady eyes burned ‘with sounds and in a similiar time yet slashed ‘away on- my atomic:oblivion of lonely ‘change, the telephone booth remains red and gray” And over -the eternity of a day There still stenis the same > Methodist Home of stone All with only room for young women And is it really a residence; when young men must not make mention? There is no space for, that sleek slacked young man without a ten cent piece With his pantlegs brushed by the Punnypeper winds or is any city strip simply always meant for the blaclmess in fantastic: fantasy on the popping out color from an only Dick Tracy? A pemny for the thoughts from this part of the planet The private price issee in the way the penny was picked up in front of this silent window glass It wes done by the side of that tossle cap fire plug Someone senseless with a sense of humor in & JUg on a sure bet will again sit on its head An orange to red primed ball to the hobo, but an ectagon to the factory -

Original Scan

Page 73

AI Interpretation

GPT

A winter Pittsburgh street becomes a cold collage of color, poverty, and private humiliation.

Iced gray sky, leftover light, a red-and-gray telephone booth, and the stone Methodist Home make the city feel both sharply seen and emotionally numb. The poem keeps measuring worth through tiny public objects: a ten-cent piece, a penny lifted off the sidewalk, a fire plug, a ball, an octagon. Out of those details comes a hard social vision where loneliness, class, and exclusion are built into the street itself.

Claude

Pittsburgh 1969 across-from-2001: iced gray sky, Methodist Home for young women, a hobo's penny as an octagon to the factory.

The poem reads the cityscape as a film still with the color dropping out of it. The orange-to-red penny flipping between 'primed ball to the hobo' and 'octagon to the factory' is the page's best refusal of a single viewpoint. The Methodist Home detail sets up the question — is it a residence if only half the population is allowed inside? — which the poem doesn't answer.