“Forty-Fourth Street.” “Forty-Fifth Street.”
“Soliciting and gambling are prohibited on CTA Vehicles.”
“Forty-Sixth Street.” Always the same chipper
trochees,
the same calculatedly absent accent,
and always right on time for the stop.
Never one block ahead or two streets over.
The work that must have poured into this announcement
staggers: careful drafting of messages, the rehearsals
(“Fiddy-Fit—Fifty-Fiff—Forty-Fifth Street”),
the installation and daily inspections,
women and men in red uniforms with clipboards,
their noses in gear boxes, fingers dipped in oil,
not to mention the building of roads through woods,
lifting ancient crustaceans out of rock, centuries of
commerce,
and the bus driver pressing the right button at every stop
just on time.
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