TABULA RASA

On the bus, a man sees me wearing a T-shirt of names

of the dead. It is his seeing my T-shirt that makes the day

glow and the inquiry in his seeing that makes it turn

cold and pause us so that between us

he builds a morgue with his gaze, and in that morgue

interpretation fashions itself from black cotton

and white letters, from impatience and mercy.

He rises to move toward me. The bus rocks

down avenues lined with playing children and liquor

stores whose painted signs read milk, cigarettes,

we accept wic. When he reaches me he reaches

for me, touches me on my shoulder until each

name listed flies from my shirt like a ribbon,

circles my head like a marquee until each name

stiffens from my head into compass needles

jutting toward their unique destinations. To be circled

that way by the dead, haloed by names

that make the bus glass shatter after each one flies

back to the site of its owner’s death.

And I know, for I am there with each name,

have been split into eleven rays of myself to fly

back to Los Angeles, Sanford, Oakland, Queens,

Jacksonville, Brooklyn, Ferguson, Cleveland,

the Bronx, Staten Island, North Charleston,

the dark bottom of the Tallahatchie River,

each place a thread to suture the grievance

left where the dead had been left, the names

magnetized to a sidewalk, a door stoop,

a parking lot, a street where the bodies are not

here, no stone rolled back but the bodies

are gone, the names cannot bring them back

and they shake as if mourning and I am made

to shake with them, can see the seams

of now snapping open, the scene behind the scenes

where vision remakes and obscures

time and place, the seams popping where

thumbs and timelines work swiftly to keep them shut.

Somewhere behind the skull of the events,

in the resonant nothing, I can hear it rupture

and wonder what was there in the inconceivable

where it seems laughter pours from the dark,

the sound of it making me afraid

to be alone in the sepulchral streets, in the gas

station’s blinding neon, in my own body,

to return to myself with that sound as part of me

and what then, and what now—

a laughter like static into which the names slip,

into where the openings have broken most

free before the eager thumbs work nimbly

to sew it all back closed, back to the surface

of the place where knowledge and arrogance

wear the same mask, where a fog of faces

in their complexions of horror blanket seeing,

and my eleven selves rush back to my twelfth self

on that bus, reenter my body, and the man

who touches my shoulder asks me the sources

of the names as though requesting a citation,

but I am wearing a blank black shirt

and tell him so, the release

complete, his confused look his own

business as he sees the names and

points, brushes

his finger against me

so that I can feel his seeing,

there, there he speaks into the wiped-clean, into

the voided-out

that is a blank screen onto which lives I cannot

ever knowingly imagine

begin to begin.