The Cicerone above the Pits
(for A. H.)
J. Quinn Brisben
Below the goddess Ceres at the foot
Of LaSalle Street in the visitor’s gallery
Of the Chicago Board of Trade
A crystal-clear language barrier,
Double-paned, dims the shouting below,
But dumb show which is, despite the seeming,
Anything but chaos, can be clearly seen;
The rainbow Joseph coats of fortune seekers
Mean something, the steps on which they stand
Mark times to come, palm in means buy,
Palm out means sell, the fingers signal prices
To the quarter-cent, each pit signifies
The abstract of quantities of grain or oil
Or of precious metals, no standard but another
Shimmering uncertainty, and half the pits
Trade only options to buy, somewhat troubling
For farmers accustomed to judging grain by feel,
Melons by thump, composting dung by heat
And ripe odor, fodder by delicate shadings.
They are villagers and the cicerone
A village explainer, faces another barrier;
Although some of his best friends are
Transylvanians, He speaks no Szekely Magyar or Romanian
But relies on an elfin firecracker woman
Speaking idiomatic body language supplemented
By some English and nudges who transfers
The cicerone’s musings into the dancing
And astringent common talk of Janosfaha,
One of a string of Unitarian villages
In the Homorod valley of Transylvania,
In Romania but Hungarian by speech and custom,
A real place with real soil, livestock, and crops,
Burdened with a cacophony of history and myth
And now thrust shivering above the pits
Where flashing signs determine shapes of lives.
The cicerone searches for a connection
And finds one unexpectedly in his grandmother
On a&frontier a long time ago:
“She hoped for a heavenly view like this
With a big window slanting hellward on the writhing
Of middlemen who bilked Oklahoma’s honest farmers,
And this place does recall Dante’s eighth circle:
The evil ditches for frauds and malefactors,
Grafters, panders, sowers of discord, evil counsellors;
But Grandma and Dante had certainties that we
Cannot have however we desire them,
And we can even pity, seeing by the
Lightning impulses that these noisy desperados
Are as obsolete as sickles and fountain pens,
Railroad firemen, or the crew laying sleepers
For rails near Walden Pond observed
With amusement by the heir to the
Latest thing in pencil factories, no return,
And freezing the frame is art but never life;
We can only move one minute per minute
Always forward and afraid as the world shrinks
And accelerates, but this is earth not hell,
For we have not abandoned hope.”
