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Is there a single thing in nature that can approach in mystery the absolute uniqueness of any human face, first, then its transformation from childhood to old age— We are surrounded at every instant by sights that ought to strike the sane unbenumbed person tongue-tied, mute with gratitude and terror. However, there may be three sane people on earth at any given time: and if you got the chance to ask them how they do it, they would not understand. I think they might just stare at you with the embarrassment of pity. Maybe smile the way you do when children suddenly reveal a secret preoccupation with their origins, careful not to cause them shame, on the contrary, to evince the great congratulating pleasure one feels in the presence of a superior talent and intelligence; or simply as one smiles to greet a friend who’s waking up, to prove no harm awaits him, you’ve dealt with and banished all harm.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations 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 Vietnam Veterans Memorial Located in Washington D.C., the Memorial is roughly 500 feet wide, and the names of soldiers who died in Vietnam are etched on its black granite walls. For more information and photos, visit The Wall-USA . again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names 58,022 names The number of names of dead soldiers etched on the wall at the time of Komunyakaa’s composing of this poem. As of 2009, there are now 58,261 names listed on the Memorial, of which, approximately 1,200 are listed as missing in action (MIAs) or prisoners of war (POWs). , half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson Andrew Johnson A soldier from the poet’s hometown of Bogalusa, Louisiana; also the name of 17th U.S. president (1865-69), who succeeded Lincoln and denied freed slaves equal protection under the law by vetoing the Civil Rights Bill and the Freedman’s Bureau Bill in 1866. ; 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.

With this rain I am satisfied we will be together in the spring. Seeds of water on my window glass, transparent sprouts and rootlets. In your backyard steady rain through the heavy dirt we dug in, our shovels excavating some history of the tiny garden. Our blades cut through the design of a previous digger: rotting boards, rocks, earthworms big as young snakes; a tarnished spoon, pink champagne foil from a party; a palmful of blue feathers from a dead jay. We dug and planted. We intend to have a history here behind this rented house. Despite the owner there is a secret between us and the ground. In the wet dirt, our fleshy bulbs and the pink cloves of garlic are making nests of roots. The fact of the garden has satisfied me all morning: that we worked side by side, your name round when I spoke it: that my fingers worked in the dirt like rain, the ground like a made bed with its mulch of leaves, orderly, full of possibilities, acts of love not yet performed. Now the water’s slap on my window has made me think of something else, suddenly, what I don’t want to, the way I wake up in the night, think I’ve heard a gun shot. The memory, news story you told me a week ago: the farmers south, far south, El Salvador, afraid to go into their fields. What does their dirt look like? I don’t know. Instead I see that some thing is being planted: U.S. soldiers watching as others bury a dead hand, arm, head, torso. To be afraid to put your hand into the dirt. To be afraid to go look at your ground: that it has been cut like skin, will bulge out like cut muscle: that on a fair day there will be subterranean thunder, then a loud, continuous hiss of blood. I wish I could see only the flowering bulbs voluptuous in the spring. But what is planted is what comes. In the fall, plant stones: in the winter, the ground gapes with stones like teeth. I hold to the plan we thought of: small: full of possibilities against despair: us handing out sheets of paper, thousands, the list of crimes: sharp thin papers delving up something in people in parking lots, shopping malls. What will come of this? Perhaps people to stand with us outside the buildings, to say again: Not in my name. Words adamant as rock, and actions, here, in the coldest months, before soldiers move again in the fields to the south.

Is she still Faith Franckenstein? Is she still the past somewhere between Frankfort, Kansas, and LA? Le Moulin du Soleil Ermenonville; her mom’s haunt with Harry Crosby, winter ’29, also haunted, still haunted. Those open fields haunted. The Faubourg Saint-Germain. The Faubourg darknesses and weeping willows, the drizzled cul-de-sacs. Is she still of memories thus deleted, giving her a certain absent aura, tall-shouldered? An uncertain world of make-believe made more believable, I wanna say. Those whims and glossy chance encounters, tossing caution to the wind. As such, a darkened moonless night, down by South Beach sans the Verrazzano, c. ’61. We plunged headlong, skinny-dipping in the languid surf with dreams of no tomorrows, no eternities. None but those decades lessened, disappeared. Those moments becoming one less and less. The near-to-next impossibility. The careless and carefree. The half-remembered face. The voice also half-remembered. Her hair way past shoulder-length, soft, satiny. Wordsworth’s “emotions recollected in tranquility”tout passé. The midnight skinny-dip.

Once you said joking slyly,If I’m killed I’ll come to haunt your solemn bed, I’ll stand and glower at the head And see if my place is empty still, or filled.

jörg piringer works in many forms, including visual, digital, and sound poetry, as well as music. In "fallen," piringer combines a visual sensibility with computer programming skills to tumble text from the English translation of The Communist Manifesto into a pile at the bottom of the page. The result is a mass of letters stripped of their original meaning and representing the failure of an idea.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>

1. Through the night the apples outside my window one by one let go their branches and drop to the lawn. I can’t see, but hear the stem-snap, the plummet through leaves, then the final thump against the ground. Sometimes two at once, or one right after another. During long moments of silence I wait and wonder about the bruised bodies, the terror of diving through air, and think I’ll go tomorrow to find the newly fallen, but they all look alike lying there dewsoaked, disappearing before me. 2. I lie beneath my window listening to the sound of apples dropping in the yard, a syncopated code I long to know, which continues even as I sleep, and dream I know the meaning of what I hear, each dull thud of unseen apple- body, the earth falling to earth once and forever, over and over.

Fame is a bee. It has a song— It has a sting— Ah, too, it has a wing.

Fame is the one that does not stay — It's occupant must die Or out of sight of estimate Ascend incessantly — Or be that most insolvent thing A Lightning in the Germ — Electrical the embryo But we demand the Flame

Four weeks in, quarreling and far from home, we came to the loneliest place. A western railroad town. Remember? I left you at the campsite with greasy pans and told our children not to follow me. The dying light had made me desperate. I broke into a hobbled run, across tracks, past warehouses with sun-blanked windows to where a playground shone in a wooded clearing. Then I was swinging, out over treetops. I saw myself never going back, yet whatever breathed in the mute woods was not another life. The sun sank. I let the swing die, my toes scuffed earth, and I was rocked into remembrance of the girl who had dreamed the life I had. Through night, dark at the root, I returned to it.