Across the Street from Two Thousand and One

By Jack Joseph Smith

LOWER FIFTH AVENUE PITTSBURGH IN THE YEAR 1969 Today The sky is still An iced gray 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 funnypaper 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 brimed ball to the hobo, but an octagon to the factory
Who, forge fitted its casted usage for a wrench And not on a dear life for the street amusement Coming from an arse wrapped round the sculpture of a phallic bench And while a stop sign continues its wait for the illiterate And confrontation keeps busy with the bizarre city reunion That Black boy flips back my memory on the appearance of a copper-coin; for an early Santa Claus on sugar wine (Young Mister Shine'em On) Without a single policemen's pleasure Had also, stopped looked and listened While the vacant eyed picture of a white on white little lady wore pink socks crossing across the cobble brick laid iron rail ___street car street___ NO ONE would be able to remember her face protesting: ...what came out of the walls of her room... AS BEING AGAINST HER Certainly her mother- informed her about being clever- To hold the percentage of her perception sustained to time would keep her life in line Yet never to be frozen finally-into isolation; she seemed the kind who had at least inscribed 1/4 of the dream in her mind And the instinct of the yesterday Black boy knew It to be against art for a face not to be traced While he then smiled to the true Which was inside manly witness: He himself was mixed up In this new forgiveness (nothing said) I had seen him turn his shoulder's down To an okey doke turn faces turn not around And I felt confident That I had traveled with his watching... past our last past A dare doom a visionary tide; STANDING ON A CREEK OF CEMENT Not hard enough to break Unsure distance anymore And did think; should we not be clear from the top?
Dangerous in mind? It was much more dangerous on foot: Appearing as just to be judged American man Appearing as just to be judged American woman And no matter how long the city main sidewalk so thin through its monolith may stretch... It squared its millions of feet into a falling mirror I hoped THEE BIG SUPREME JUST for HISTORY Had not already "called" the abyss

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A long urban poem set on Lower Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh in 1969, cataloguing weather, street characters, racial encounter, gendered observation, and civic decay as the city sidewalk becomes a falling mirror in which national identity is tested and the speaker hopes the 'Big Supreme' has not already called the abyss.

The poem grounds abstraction in physical detail — a red telephone booth, a fire plug, cobblestone rail tracks, pink socks — while steadily building toward the apocalyptic fear that the city's monolith of concrete conceals a spiritual void.

Claude

Placed by its heading at 'LOWER FIFTH AVENUE / PITTSBURGH IN THE YEAR / 1969', the poem looks out on a winter street where 'The sky is still / An iced gray' and 'Winter is a whisper', then remembers a 'Methodist Home of stone / All with only room for young women', 'that sleek slacked young man / without a ten cent piece', 'That Black boy' with a 'copper-coin' and 'a white on white little lady' crossing the '___street car street___'. It ends asking whether the sidewalk that 'squared its millions of feet / into a falling mirror' has already '"called" the abyss'.

One intersection becomes a screen for questions about who may stay, reside or be remembered, and comic-strip figures such as 'Dick Tracy' and '(Young Mister Shine'em On)' sit beside real social sorting. The address 'TWO THOUSAND AND ONE' doubles as a future date, and the mirror image turns the street into a surface that returns judgment. 'similiar', 'tossle' and 'brimed' are typed forms, and the offset '(nothing said)' and 'past our last past' are kept as typed.