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Facing It
- Wesleyan University Press
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Facing It My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't, dammit: No tears. Fm 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. 63 About the Author Born in the rural community of Bogalusa, Louisiana, Yusef Komunyakaa served in Vietnam as a correspondent and editor of TheSouthern Cross and received a Bronze Star for his service as a journalist. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Colorado in 1975, completed his masters degree in 1978 at Colorado State University, and earned an MFA from The University of California at Irvine in 1980. The author of nine collections of poetry, Komunyakaa won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Prize for his bookNeon Vernacular (Wesleyan, 1994). He has also been awarded the Thomas Forcade Award, the William Faulkner Prize, the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, the Hanes Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was awarded the Shelley Memorial Prize by the Poetry Society of America. Komunyakaa has taught at Indiana State University, Washington University , University of California at Berkeley, and the University of New Orleans, and is currently Professor in the Council of Humanities and Creative Writing at Princeton University. ...