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

Page 85

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

Second placement of 'Here For A Moment' in the book, same Mt. Lebanon material as page 59.

Printing this poem twice lets it function as a chapter break for the book's Pittsburgh memory. Both placements read slightly differently because the surrounding material is different, which is the argument for the reprint. The speaker is willing to let a single piece of writing be load-bearing at two points.