Page 73

By Jack Joseph Smith

ACROSS THE STREET FROM TWO THOUSAND AND ONE 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

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The speaker compares an iced gray day with yesterday's bursts of Pittsburgh street color and asks who can find a place in the city.

The speaker links street observation to poverty through a ten cent piece and a picked-up penny. He asks how a residence can house young women while making no room for a penniless young man. In the closing lines, he calls the same object an orange to red brimed ball for the hobo and an octagon for the factory.

Claude

Headed 'ACROSS THE STREET FROM / TWO THOUSAND AND ONE / LOWER FIFTH AVENUE / PITTSBURGH IN THE YEAR / 1969', the poem sets 'Today', with a sky 'An iced gray' and 'Left over light', against 'Yesterday', a Pittsburgh street of Monongahela wind, a telephone booth that 'remains red and gray', a 'Methodist Home of stone' with 'only room for young women', a 'sleek slacked young man / without a ten cent piece', a penny picked up by a 'tossle cap fire plug', and a final 'orange to red brimed ball to the hobo, / but an octagon to the factory'.

The title turns the view from the Music Distributing Company's own Fifth Avenue address into a fixed observation post, and the poem records the street with a comic-strip eye, from the 'funnypaper wind' to Dick Tracy's popping colors. Small coins and street objects measure who belongs: women are housed, the penniless young man has no place. The closing image, one shape read two ways, shows how the same city sign means a warm, bright thing to the hobo and a stop order to the factory.