Nineteen

I am of two minds about what I did.
—Mathias Rust, 20 years after landing a plane
in the middle of Moscow

A West German
flew me through

a hole he saw
in their thinking.

Sunlit, the rivers
charted Russian towns

below us,
threads more golden

the longer
we followed them.

When the glints
grew into stars

on a MiG making passes,
he kept going over

why we couldn't land.

*

page 56

Too slow for the jet
to keep up,

we burrowed into
clouds until

the voices in
his headset

stopped talking,
the only tirade

the propeller.
At the end of his tunnel vision

Red Square,
the cathedral towers

for welcoming wands.

*

As bad as Chernobyl.
Gorbachev worried

about fallout.
He retired the generals

who didn't believe
their pilot's eyes.

(Our flutter
on their radar?

Geese)

page 57

A chance to purge
the politburo—

all those red faces
all those assembling.

*

Mathias was
listening at last

when first I saw
his face.

Above the caption
the court translator

dangled in his ear
ideas about

a state of mind,
how someone our age

got there.
Not quoted yet

the stenographers
writing his sentence,

the plane's new owner
impatient for

the investment
to mature.