When in 2009 the G20 Summit Convened in Pittsburgh

By Peter Oresick
Look who’s whistling through bleached teeth now,
one hand on svelte hip, one fist pumping the air–
Pittsburgh–once that madcap & zany joke factory
 
now chosen for her fetching comeback tale
& her earth-sheltered welcome center
& her Warhol & her Tropical Forest Conservatory
 
& her Rosemont, working farm of the moguls
of ketchup. Rarely since the global credit crisis
do Pittsburghers cross bridges or rivers or the thresholds
 
of stunningly profitable ventures. Yet tonight,
as global output contracts at a pace not seen since
the 1930s, as the French president proposes reform
 
of the International Monetary Fund & the US
president delights in the local crepes with crispy edges,
& as Greenpeace commandos drape a WHAT THE FUCK?
 
banner from the deck of the West End Bridge
(above which Chinook & Black Hawk helicopter hover),
& as police use the LRAD sound cannon on protesters
for the first time in the United States or Canada–
 
a Pittsburgh Pirate homers into the Allegheny River
& sets the esplanade ablaze with the flash
& fizzle of fireworks launched at the flat lozenge
 
of the moon, a ghostly azure, suspended low
above the sweep of the cantilevered roofs
on the opposite shoreline–the poured concrete,
 
the glass towers, the obelisks–a costly parody
of bygone days when confidence in the future, evinced
by our sixty miles of integrated mills, was illustrated
 
by a time capsule, a chamber “hermetically” sealed
in Steel City alloys, bicentennially filled with newsprint
& artifacts of 1958 Pittsburgh to be cracked open
 
& savored in some distant epoch, an idea first
embraced by Esarhaddon, son of Sennacherib, king
of Assyria, Babylonia, & Egypt, & reenacted now
 
in waves of sound & light–the roar of fireworks night
for a losing franchise, the hoarse voices of Pittsburghers–
wafting into the void, accelerated by Jupiter’s pull,
 
& then hurled by Jupiter out of the solar system,
yet another urban missive from a noisy planet,
a comingling of mathematics and human music, charming
 
& powerful, a murmur preserved of our city-state
that once flourished–before its citizens dispersed
to other lands, to greater deeds on the blue Earth.

Copyright Credit: "When in 2009 the G20 Summit Convened in Pittsburgh" from Iconoscope: New and Selected Poems, by Peter Oresick, © 2015.  All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.