Passenger† by Jorie Graham   In “Passenger,” a post-9/11 poem from the collection Overlord, Jorie Graham, through various shifts of personal deixis, attempts to bring imagination and empathy together. One might ask immediately, what does empathy have to do with sudden shifts of deixis?  Deixis belongs to orientational features of language, as it grounds the language in specific time and place. Isaac Revzinconsiders deixis an indispensable part of human communication, calling it “the primordial function of gesture.”1 Deixis best exemplifies a bodily-oriented dimension of language. It is precisely through the sudden turns of personal deixis that Graham creates the relationship between the speaker of the poem and the poem’s other character. Through the shift of personal deixis, Graham conveys the process of thinking involved…