Sign Inventory - week 2

I am still working on this, but I wanted to just get it on here tonight.


Facing It
by Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaa
My black face fades,
1 The poem begins its first stanza with four lines that have an iamb appearance, the last two of which have pronounced consonance at the beginning of the words rather than the end. Interesting that the word fades would have the stress. If this is a true Iamb the more powerful beginning consonants then are b in black and f in fade, this would turn away the reader from the emphasis on face and move them to focus on fade. Black and fade seem stronger than face indicating that the fading is more important than racial color black being merely something that will fade into whatever the speaker is looking towards.

2. The speaker seems to put himself or see himself as both unrecognizable and somehow attached to an object in front of him also described as black. The repetition of black in this second line perhaps lending more power to the first instance and a sense of new meaning or discovery of the word as it relates to an object that makes the speaker invisible for the moment.


I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
The breaks are not subtle here but the use of the colon signifies the lesser importance of tears to determination in the word damnit, tears is subordinate, leaving the reader uncertain as to if the speaker is in fact crying or perhaps more importantly angry that tears that have not come might come, and yet we almost sense that there are tears, tears that the speaker ironically cannot see in the black reflection or granite but merely must feel or taste
I'm stone. I'm flesh. Here the oxymoron seems to be crafting a paradox, while the speaker cannot be literally be both stone and flesh he is determined to try or perhaps he is noticing both that part of him that is flesh and that part of him that is attached to the stone, at any rate the oxmoron is not an accident clearly seems to try to form a paradox which does not seem to be amusing but rather ironic in either perception or two states of being neither which are compatiable. two periods in the line indicate either a wish and a reality. This reinforces the afformentioned lines I said I wouldn’t no tears. The speaker may want to be stone but flesh is revealed.
My clouded reflection eyes me
The clouding here is interesting because we can not be certain if the clouded reflection is entirely due to the speakers sking tone reflecting of of a dark substance or if there is additional clouding from tears, and even though there is an indication of tears there I nothing trite or to the point ( the poet does not say for example I cried, he merely states I said I wouldn’t indicating he might be crying or that he regrets crying or that he will not cry.
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
an interesting choice of words becoming more abstract, a bird of prey is a fairly common expression but it is connected to profile of night a vague and strange expression the connection continues with slanted against the morning. Indicating that whatever he is looking at is acting as a shield from light like a partial eclipse and the words slanted against seem to indicate both a perspective on the object and a pushing away of, the morning light it seems is being slightly attacked by the object. So the object is given a sense of antagonist in the poem. It swallows the speaker and pushes the source of light from view.
I turn this way the stone let’s me go
Here the stone is personified and it is made even clearer that it is acting in some sort of antagonistic manner, but merely turning the speaker is able to escape it’s effect, by turning he is free of it’s ability to hide light and hide his appearance. The use of the dash here indicates that the speaker is surprised or wants the audience to be surprised by how simple he escapes his unanimated protagonist.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
A second turn and again the speaker is inside an object
This time the object is spelled out clearly, what the speaker has been looking at the granite object that has engulfed him and served as a immobile antagonistic figure is named, or at least the assumption is that is the case that the speaker is merely turning away from and then back to the memorial, of course he could be turning to the memorial for the first time-though that seems illogical given the amount of time the speaker spends describing the effect of the object before he names it.
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
Here the speaker goes farther to exemplify the morning light as his ally against the antognistic nature of the black granate that swallows him and hides from him what he is looking for
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
A very specific inventory makes it clear where he is and what he is there for, the odd interjection of the impossible unless the speaker is a ghost which seems unlikely as he has a human reflection is that he half-expects to find his own name, but not in reality in smoke. The imagery of smoke once again brings us back to words like black and images of a scewed perspective on what exactly he is looking at or for
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
In this line the speaker literally for the first time touches the object that has anatomized him, and he does so it seems because he has a connection to the name, this is further clarified by imagery of a past sensory experience, the flash from the bobby trap connects to the name and we sense safely enough that the speaker is talking about the death of someone he not only knew but experienced perhaps even shared in the experience of that persons death.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
Someone is close to the speaker and his perspective shifts towards her and names from the wall seem to move to her four syllables in this line have the sense again of the iamb but it is getting harder to tell how these syllables should be stressed if we go with the iamb again though some interesting things happen , shim, on, wo , blouse are all emphasized this probably would be read wuickly without to much empahsise at all but the stress still creates intrest particularly looking at the syllables shim on and wo and how they make one feel stangley sad and alienated. And the woman is she connected to all the names or does the speaker connect her to the one name touched.
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall. ]
she leaves easily and quickly but the names are there, for a moment she seems to be connected to the names also as they shimmer on her blouse, but she leaves in a sense so quickly that there is detachment on her belhalf and irony that her no longer attending to the particular names thespeaker sees – the names still persist.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
Something disorients the speaker, it is difficult to tell if this is in the mind or actually visual. A red bird’s wings seem to point to something significant, he is looking at a memorial for Vietnam and he describes a vision of a red bird and it’s wings and one wonders if he is remembering something from the past is there a connection in the color choice of red to blood or communism and is there a connection in wings to planes or other things that fly or is he merely talking about his own actual experiences at the moment where he sees a bird, but the use of color and descriptive elements seems like no mistake or lucky chance vision.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
Here the image of the bird as a plane is clearly cemented and though we are not certain that this could not be an actual plane flying overhead it seems far more likely that his plane is a memory
A white vet's image floats
Again we suspect that delusion is causing remembered images rather than actual images as the speaker recalls the veterean he may or may not see the name of, he seems to have an illusionary image spring out from the darkness and the use of white, the first time in the poem is stark in contrast and grabs the readers attention.
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone.
Again it is not completely clear if he is observing other people who are looking at the memorial or if he is lost in memory or both
In the black mirror
This black mirror is clearly the memorial the granite object and then the speaker refers to himse3lf as the mirror, as he must now associate himself with the object.
a woman’s trying to erase names:
the first line is delusional a desire of the speaker oversome his own senses
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
He quickly corrects himself and end the poem with a simple observation or a simple memory. It is not completely clear which, but both possibilities are interesting because wither shows that he has a more stable sense of who he is an where he is by the last statement. And it is interesting that he chooses a loving action of brushing hair, hair something so often thought of when remembering the era, hair that was long and wavy or tall and unmanageable, sheared away before the soldier left for his tour of duty.