By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Public life feels dangerous because bodies are judged before they are known.
The fragment reduces the city to a thin main sidewalk and a falling mirror made from millions of feet, so ordinary walking becomes exposure. American man and American woman sound less like identities than verdicts already waiting to be imposed. The final appeal to the Big Supreme fears that history itself may already have opened onto the abyss.
Closing beat of the Pittsburgh sequence: dangerous on foot as an American man or woman, city sidewalk as a falling mirror, a prayer that the Supreme hasn't already called the abyss.
The poem puts judgement on the sidewalk itself — the pavement looks up and assesses. 'Squared its millions of feet into a falling mirror' is the figure that gives the city its self-consciousness. The capitalized 'THEE BIG SUPREME' is the poem's nervous humor, a way of asking the serious question without dressing up for it.