Empty Bus
for Rose Gorman & The Tuxedo Project
I wake with a start
on a bus in a strange town.
Among those not riding along,
writers from a prison where
I haven’t returned in months.
Maybe they sit tonight
reading to each other
around a table in a block room
they can sometimes share.
I owe them.
*
I recover Bishop’s poems
from under the seat, also
a book with a map on the cover.
Some day, an auto worker
promised a young poet
in long-ago Detroit, Some day
the world is ours. Maybe Levine
guessed the dream’s cost —
Mandela on Robben Island,
King in Memphis. Who
can afford to hope? My dad
never heard the dog sigh
in sleep without the gut-twitch
of shells and a chatter of guns.
I haul my own paternal dreams.
*
What howls now — a scouring
wind. Sometimes a dead hush.
The driver calls out streets
and I study the route. My bus
is missing Wilfredo Monje,
who taught me Spanish names
for tools while I mixed mortar
and he laid block for a school
outside San Pedro Sula.
One morning, without a word
he handed me his month-old
God-child, and laughed at my
translated face. By now she’s ten.
*
Outside the bus, a blear — neon
and a lone girl in a thin coat.
In Detroit, Rose has a house
alive with neighbor children
reading, writing, and eating her food.
Evenings she gathers friends
to read Toni Morrison.
I pull another book
from under the seat —
four masks on the cover —
and find among detonations
Reginald Dwayne Betts
invoking a future — Ours.
As if on cue,
the behemoth shudders to a stop
and I disembark to walk
into a world I love.