Page 85

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

Memory walks through Pittsburgh and Mount Lebanon as if work, literature, and local speech were all wearing down into dust.

Brick faces, missing cedar trees, pennyless pockets, and broken steel give the landscape a tired material weight. The voice resists blaming mere noise or silence; what hurts is the shrinking remainder of what has been read, built, and remembered. Writing becomes a laborer's act here, stubborn but unromantic, closer to dust and booze than to refinement.

Claude

A second placement of 'Here For A Moment', repeating the page-59 text: Mount Lebanon and 'Western Pennsylvania', 'a spirit with only sign language left for my hands', 'Pittsburgh steel back from 1981', resolving to 'write my memory into dust'.

The poem returns verbatim from page 59, and the reprint is the point: a single Pittsburgh-memory lyric is allowed to be load-bearing at two places in the book, functioning almost as a recurring refrain or chapter marker. The reading is the same - geography over body, inheritance thinned to 'the less and less / Of all that's been read', composition as a worker's dusty labor - but the surrounding material differs, so the second placement lands with a different weight. The speaker's willingness to let one piece of writing recur is itself a statement about which memory the book cannot set down. Source spellings 'pennyless' and 'disreguards' are preserved as written.