Post 2: (Yusef Komunyakaa, Talking Dirty to the Gods)

"In the moon who showed him how
To tread footsteps Napoleon left.
After prisoners worked ice,
Routing a canal through an eternal

White field of loneliness, he didn't
Want anyone to remember his hands
Trembled as he placed flowers
On her snowcapped grave."

From Stalin, a gem of Y.K's roving imagination. As in all of his poems, the historical fades, falls into its disembodied light. Instead, what the poet sees, what the reader hears, is the human, a face, a small evocation, as the flowers on the snowcapped grave, as in this samplet, we move from a world of "movements," of states and projects, of a distant language, into an earth of intimacy, and of tremendous precision.