The Burial of Dead & Facing It Un-Stoned

[alice wellintown]

Even in fixed architectual or mathamatical designs, even where the
identities of the living and the dead are fixed in them, our
reflections (reflexive thoughts and images), are alive,  even when
clouded, with emotion, and remembrance, and the trauma,  and with the
quotidian needs and desires of both the living and the dead.



As if two human figures in an architectural rendering had briefly come
to life and begun exchanging pleasentries
oblivious to the lofty vision towering above them
the young women swept toward the Sixth Avenue entrance
to either side of which stood to doormen spledidly uninformed
living pillars before whose serene inertia one was either intimidated
into moving along or not
Let the hair-oiled "bouncer" ply his trade in the Bowery
the electrical gates of Fifth Avenue mansions swing to or fro at the
remote touch of a button--
here at I. J. & K. Smokefoots
without a word or indeed a physical movement
because of how and where the pillars stood
a visitor might know in not too lengthy an instant how and where she
stood as well



Say it! No idea but in things. Mr. / Paterson has gone away / to rest
and write. Inside the bus one sees / his thoughts sitting and
standing. His / Thought alight and scater---

Who are these people (how complex / the mathematic) among whom I see
myself / in the regularly ordered plateglass of / his thoughts,
glimmering before shoes and bicycles? / The walk incommunicado, the /
equation is beyond solution,  yet / its sense is clear--that they may
live / his thought is listed in the Telephone /  Directory--"

from Paterson, William Carlos Williams

Facing It

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go.
I turn that way--I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

Yusef Komunyakaa