What Happened to the Soviet Union

She has changed and put on make-up.
The flowers on the table
wait, carefully quiet as her face.
She tells us she's the editor
of Moldova's premier journal.

The man who shoots art films
—long, slow takes in Paris cafes—
turns like a lizard following a fly
to stare at this woman
who sits very upright and waits.
He takes down the atlas,
flicks through the index
to see where Moldova might be.
We stand, all heads bowed to the page,
like the sunflowers we saw on the way here
that had left off their praising
and dipped to beg grace.
Moldova lies open before us.
She leans to outline her country.
Her stubborn body
won't shrink or back off.
Slowly she explains the situation.
The Soviets have gone,
their coastline has been ceded to the Ukraine,
their soil is poisoned by intensive farming.
We follow her finger in silence.
She closes the atlas and lifts it back onto the shelf.
She sits once again in the fleur-de-lis chair
in the salon of the Swiss chateau.