Poverty Program Intrusion

By Jack Joseph Smith

It was on Pittsburgh's lower Fifth Avenue where I was preaching the word after work Which at that time was William Saroyan No; it wasn't Fifth Avenue It was Forbes Street which is one street up South The tavern where I'd gone was down from the tunnel that leads toward the Southside That's how I know now through that huge round stone It was a bad bar with too much mirror and no white light Piss over glassy fine dirt Like the coal one can breathe Finished to a flush from footwork beneath a strung out brick alley lady Like thin resin over a floor of ants For high-heeled, low-soled lonely danced jukebox shoes To be devil enticed down through the faded up gleam of a face peering from the below of 1930 squared black tile She was in nasty garment shape of torn pale green shades With a gray spider shawl tied to her loose-pinned bun of hair Drunk with loss beneath forgiveness of a kind the heavens would pile up on a doomsday While I was young and foolish with fancy notions from my own emotional problem with perception (no mirror now) We had started at one of the back bench hard booth brown black on black tables (the thick of the fiftiesh type plastic excapes me) But from there along the wall I now remember us seated at the bar on... round old cracked red leather able to spin stool high big tops "In the time of your life," I read, "if in that time of your life you must kill, then kill, and don't feel bad about it."
I could say that (I was talking about killing in herself what was killing her) but I wasn't I was just reading to the downcast Slumming my mind into the drunken faithful Until I gave her the hard bound collection and walked like a wrinkled Wasp out the door A week later I dear one returned Dayturned distant from fresh shower and shave- but shoulder cover tucked into my Seersucker usual, I went again into the dim lit red blues Among the American lower classes Fiction Hall of Hell Evading with peripheral vision I asked the bartending man through the vast mirrored back of his head if the woman had since then been there- As I Carnival like could see a 180 degree of hag men and blue frozen veined women shake their heads in the oval of no Nowhere to be found... on the questioned gesture of my Jimmy-Cagney-fingered spread Then the streek of my face right on right eye teeth Across a mamouth mirrors fingernailed valley of dust: Slammed home my image in profile of a child in the death wing of a zoo As I caught my act in time not to ask about binge and rebirth taking two weeks- Hopefully on the lam she was lucky with the second half And do the eyes of the dispossessed answer? "To a tenement hotel, mister socialworker star." "That beats the flophouse by a dollar!" "Grateful to sell her inside story." "On the cover of that Saroyan." (yes you were after) -To somebody lesser, or somebody greater- But definitely better for her Than a kid like you

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A young speaker reads Saroyan to a woman in a Pittsburgh bar and gives her the book. On returning a week later, the speaker finds her absent and questions the gesture while looking in a mirror.

The speaker describes the jukebox shoes and gray spider shawl before confronting the reflected child in the death wing of a zoo. The imagined sale of the book leaves the speaker's wish to help tangled with a wish to be important.

Claude

The speaker recalls 'preaching the word after work / Which at that time was William Saroyan' in 'a bad bar / with too much mirror and no white light' on Forbes Street, reading '"In the time of your life,"' to a woman in 'torn pale green shades' and 'a gray spider shawl', giving her 'the hard bound collection' and walking out 'like a wrinkled Wasp'. Returning 'A week later', the speaker finds her gone and sees in the bar mirror 'my image in profile / of a child in the death wing of a zoo', and the poem ends 'But definitely better for her / [blank] Than a kid like you'.

The title's intrusion is the speaker's own: a well-meant reading program brought into a bar, judged in the end by the bar's mirror and by the imagined answers of 'the dispossessed'. Typed hanging indents carry the poem's storytelling rhythm, and '(no mirror now)' and '(yes you were after)' are set off where the scan places them.