Page 73

By Jack Joseph Smith

ACROSS THE STREET FROM TWO 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 And color is dropping Through... Left over-light Yesterday A sunny street suddenly turned out of the Monongahela river wind maze Had just as quickly with chemical yellow smoothness gone back into a glaze As 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 stands 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 funnypeper wind; or is any city strip simply always meant for the blackness in fantastic 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 penny was picked up in front of this silent window glass It was done by the side of that tossle cap fire plug Someone senseless with a sense of humor in a jug on a sure bet will again sit on its head An orange to red brined ball to the hobo; but an octagon to the factory

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

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

Iced grey 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 brined ball, an octagon. Out of those details comes a hard social vision where loneliness, class, and exclusion are built into the street itself.

Claude

'Across The Street From / Two Thousand And One / Lower Fifth Avenue / Pittsburgh In The Year / 1969': an 'iced grey' winter sky where 'color is dropping', a 'Methodist Home of stone' with 'only room for young women', and a penny picked up by a fire plug, 'An orange to red brined ball to the hobo; / but an octagon to the factory'.

The poem opens the long Pittsburgh sequence by draining the city of color - 'iced grey', 'Winter is a whisper', 'Left over-light' - so the street reads like a film still going monochrome. Worth gets measured in tiny public objects: 'a ten cent piece', the lifted penny, the 'tossle cap fire plug'. The Methodist Home sets the poem's unanswered question - 'is it really a residence; / when young men must not make mention?' - making exclusion structural to the architecture. The closing double-vision of the penny, sphere to the hobo and 'octagon to the factory', is the page's refusal of a single viewpoint: the same coin is shaped differently by who needs it. Source spellings like 'similiar' are preserved as written.