Visiting the moving wall

Heavy head, longish day. For a poetry class assignment, I visited the traveling Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Phoenix for the weekend. I should have studied the original first, as this one was oddly organized. I was distracted trying to figure out the significance of apparent paragraphs, separated by blank space -- do they represent different years, or what? No, they are meaningless, an artifact of the fact that this version of the moving wall does not taper off at the ends. The "paragraphs" represent names on one panel of the original, I think, though some of the lists seem to continue from one panel to the next, thus obliterating any visible pattern of decreasing numbers of lines and throwing me into confusion as I tried to understand the artist's vision. This defective replica appears to exist solely for people who can't make it to Washington, D.C., to rub names from on bits of paper.

I was also thrown by the angled junction of the two wings, the right-hand wing starting with 1959 at the top, and the left-hand wing ending with 1975 at the bottom. I was sure the replica had been put together incorrectly! But I found a quote from the artist on the internet, and that turns out to be correct. She visualized starting from the angle at 1959 and moving along toward the east as the wall tapers into the ground, then circling around to start again at the tapered end of the west wall and returning to the angle, ending with 1975 at the bottom of the last column on that side. Odd, but it works. The long, tapered wings, joined at an angle, look like a scar in the earth from above, the shortest panel at each end with only one line of names, a vision completely obliterated by our version of the moving wall. There are several replicas, and from photos I could see that one of them, probably the first one made, does actually taper like the original though it's only half the original's size.

After this puzzling wall visit, I munched salad at Wildflower Bakery while reading 42 poems by Yusef Komunyakaa about the Vietnam War, which he experienced as a journalist (published as a collection titled Dien Cai Dau). The last poem is about the wall. My head became heavier and heavier reading all these poems. I didn't lose anyone in that war. Grumpy was damaged by it, says he was a horrible soldier, and when asked if he wanted to go see the wall, said: "No way in hell!" He proudly pissed on Lyndon Johnson's grave some years ago. It's been a while since I was outraged (for several years) by that rotten war. What fun to revisit the meaningless horror of it.