The higher power and impersonality
of satellites
and drones have nearly made him obsolete; still,
eccentrically aloft, he guides
his delicate aircraft
on airstreams that flutter an
enemy flag
several miles below, and he banks
like the gesture
that leads a ballerina's turn,
but he desires no audience.
What intricate obsession has jeweled this
cockpit
with a dazzling, Latinate instrumentation?
In this black, airless sky of ice crystals,
his heat-sensitive cameras caress
an agriculture of warfare below:
missile silos,
grids of weaponry, infantry and air
corps
stored in barracks like dormant
bees.
If he prays, probably it is a
tactical prayer:
not to become a blotch
of light smeared into a streak
by a radar's radial sweep. For
when his wings
brush enemy airspace, he becomes
a heresy against Treaty,
a target fit for the righteous,
howling fighter-planes
curving up in silver clusters out
of dark under-space.
In Indianapolis his wife once
awoke terrified
from a dream in which ground-artillery
had blasted his
airplane into a shower
of alloy and plexiglass; but in
his own dream,
ejecting in time, he hangs by slender cords
beneath a dome of silk like a
spider traveling on the breeze.
For those precious moments, he is borne in a world
without radio or loyalties or
mission. And then he tumbles
on frozen turf or is it an orchard
or a cornfield?--
slowly rises to un-clip the
cords,
to assume his villain's stance like a
scarecrow--
soldiers
with faces
all alike flocking toward him, radios squawking
a foreign static, an orange dawn
entering enemy East.
Captured, he knows he should be
afraid or courageous,
but instead he simply longs for
the farmland
surrounding Bloomington, Indiana.
copyright Hans Ostrom 1979/2014
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