issue 19, 1996
Their love for Mickey Mouse
& Sleeping Beauty, for blue
jeans & cosmic pinball
backdrops the glow
of Little Boy & Fat Man.
Madame Butterfly’s kimono
branches into cherry trees,
as Japanese in America’s Cup
T-shirts gaze into strip clubs
& Lebanese take-aways.
But no trick photography
can erase White Australia
till it’s a subtitle for Kabuki
masks. Two young men from Osaka
fire flashbulbs at a blonde
posed beneath the Norgen-
Vaaz ice cream sign,
draped in a T-shirt mini.
She seems to know everything
about gods, how to reverse
Circe’s curse. The men pay
five dollars a pose, as she
tucks each bill between her breasts,
saying, “I don’t sleep
with the enemy.” They smile
& bow. She slips a foot
in & out of a read shoe.
Silhouettes burn into stone
walls & earth. Three years
later, standing a block away
from the ice cream sign,
she goes back. Now,
with shadows washing out
as much of her face
night’s mercy can undo,
they’ll know how light
corrupts the body of an angel
who stands on a city corner
to make a street musician
play his sax three times harder.
—————
Yusef Komunyakaa's numerous books of poems include Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999; Talking Dirty to the Gods; Thieves of Paradise, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award; Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Magic City; Dien Cai Dau, which won the Dark Room Poetry Prize; I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; Copacetic; and most recently, The Emperor of Water Clocks. Komunyakaa's prose is collected in Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries. He also co-edited The Jazz Poetry Anthology and co-translated The Insomnia of Fire by Nguyen Quang Thieu. His honors include the William Faulkner Prize from the Universite Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, where he served as a correspondent and managing editor of the Southern Cross. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Yusef Komunyakaa is a senior faculty member in the NYU Creative Writing Program.