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Split
Screen
This late-rising morning I allowed myself
antepenultimate to Christmas Eve,
I wondered how the federal bureaus of inter-obfuscation
might be affecting the prospects of my potential pension.
So, towelling between shower and the final touch of hair spray,
I punched the power button
and arrowed up to the local business channel
to watch the how-now of the Dow
as displayed fifteen minutes behind the equities rising (or not)
three thousand miles east.
Above the steady journey of acronyms and their eighths
traversing east to west at the foot of the screen,
the honest frequencies proclaimed
talking heads were assumed to be correct,
but the station could not
be construed as recommending any sale, nor
could it be held liable for any wrong or its consequences,
and furthermore,
guests paid for the right to appear as fiscal magi.
I turned away to finish drying
and to layer in white from my clothing drawers,
then looked up again
in time for the charts of the March T-bills and Eurodollars,
and reached down again
for the nearer future of my sock drawer,
missing the quotes on gold and silver
-- London and New York --
as the Dow sighed its up-tick down
from seventeen and one-eighth to fifteen and three-quarters,
-- and suddenly
the top three quarters of the screen
stared to the world
a Slavic Blessed Virgin,
and pitched a special sale of one-time-only,
one-of-a-kind Russian religious art,
-- each item going to the first caller --
above the rolling Dow quotes,
-- with brief remarks about the special value of icons
done by this highly prized artist --
but no disclosures
of what starving parish priest
or thieving apparatchik first
sold these precious-metal saints and bejeweled dreams of deity
into the tables of temple courtyard trade.
What a contrast to pork bellies and cocoa contracts,
I thought,
reaching for dark socks from the sock drawer,
knowing that,
from decades of grim hopes,
peasant voices had candled before these figures
prayers
thousands of flames brighter
than my twenty-one-inch screen,
prayers
deeper-voiced than the monaural speaker
briskly hurrying me
to call now
and snap up
The Virgin Mary for twenty-four hundred,
God the Father for twenty-eight
fifty.
(c) R. S.
Carlson 2000 |