Jake Adam York is the author of Murder Ballads (2005), winner of the Elixir Prize in Poetry; A Murmuration of Starlings (2008), co-winner of the Crab Orchard Open Competition and winner of the Colorado Book Award; and Persons Unknown (2010), published by Southern Illinois University Press as an editor's selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, New South, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, The Northwest Review, Poetry Daily and others. An associate professor and director of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver, York co-edits Copper Nickel. Originally from Alabama, York was educated at Auburn and Cornell. He is also the author of a work of literary criticism, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry (Routledge, 2005).
SENSITIVITY
May 4, 1959
for Mack Charles Parker, lynched near Poplarville, Mississippi,
April 24, 1959, recovered from the Pearl River, May 4, 1959
Six weeks since that whisper rose
into the window of a stage
behind the Half Note's bar,
whisper Mingus let spread like a bruise,
Lester Young is dead, six weeks
since he fell from the sky,
dead off the plane from Paris,
and each night this goodbye's
gone more sensitive. Now
the flats are hid, and Handy's learned
to fold the sound of breath
inside his notes—the bleeding throat,
tongue's last epileptic flutter—
while Mingus thrills the bass
no microphone can hold.
Drinks tremble like the river
halfway from here to the grave,
pulled by wind or plummet,
cough of strings beneath the hand,
and uptown a tape is waiting
for magnets to say this again,
a teletype is writing a story
for tomorrow's Times—
a body pulled from a river
in Mississippi, with only fingers
for a name. But here
only the drinks are listening
as Ervin rises, ghosting Handy's lead,
and even they cannot hear
how the rivers heal their quiet,
how they fill their scars so perfectly
that remember feels like forget.
Then the breath is gone.
The wood hums a moment longer,
and each surface smoothes
till the glasses and the waters
are glass again, and ready
to catch each clap,
each note that falls.
COLLECT
...in a way, all of us are responsible for Bo's death, because we've let
people like those killers have their way, and decent people have just sat by.
—Mamie Till, 1956
Morning wraps the stars and the dark
that will come again
and so is a promise,
an envelope
in which some dark may be folded
like a list of names,
so first light on the Tallahatchie
is a prayer that light
may be shoaled
by some arm or shoulder
as a pane of light will smoke
until the swollen face emerges
and morning on a magazine's spread
burns into the retinas
the letters of a prayer for the river
and the pine box and the boxcar
on which some light no one will ever remember
has already laid its blessing
and a prayer for Mamie Till
for looking when they told her not to,
for leaving the casket open
so everyone could see
what hatred can do to a body,
what color can do,
so Chicago's breath could settle
through the glass and the suit and into the wounds
to be taken back into the lungs,
a gauze to blot astonishment,
so Mississippi's breath, stolen north,
could swathe him too
then gather like river in our lungs
and keep some part of breath
from entering there again
and so become a prayer
for the breath we did not take
for the words we did not say,
the missing part of breath that makes a silence
in which a body can break the water's calm,
in which everything can be heard,
light peeling from the wounds of the stars
and distant birds that sing like glass,
a clot in the tissue of the sky.
ELEGY
Gadsden, Alabama
The finger is gone that pointed the way
so the General could escape,
the Confederate who would enshrine the finger
and its girl and turn them into stone,
and now the finger is gone from the marble hand,
proving every body is mutable,
however white, so the finger is just a story
of a finger that points to its absence
which everyone ignores as they pass
incognito as the getaways
of suburban legend, having gloved the hand
and hung until it gave
so they could move like Forrest
away from the water and into history,
lost in the crowd or the trees, until that day
after each Thanksgiving
when all the county's majorettes, its quarterbacks
and former mayors and fez-hatted shriners
file in their large white Cadillacs,
those heroes among them, waving
as they pass down Broad Street, disappearing
as if she still pointed the way.
They don't look back. Behind her the bridge
arches over the compendious river,
into the dimmer streets of East Gadsden
where one parade night two men
knocked then shot a preacher in his door,
sure of a Black Panther front, a fist
they had to keep from rising, then pulled away,
slowly, as if in their own parade,
these Klansmen, Forrest's distant kin,
scanning the windows and the doors,
passing the boarded juke and the store
where months later a neighborhood teen
would rob and hold the clerk at gunpoint
and push him into the storeroom
and douse him in gasoline then light the match
just to scare him, he'd say,
before the flames went up, burning his face
into a map of the county, everyone would read
as an answer, leaving him to stagger,
leaving him to crawl toward the door
to call out through the slow ooze of dawn.
In Greek, elegy means mourning song,
a poem for what's been lost, and the Greeks
always cut something from their lines
a syllable or two, to create a silence
or a place to hear it, maybe breaking meter
and slipping in an iamb, which means limping
or lame, like the gait of a wounded man,
stepping quick then stopping, so the pain can arrive,
and so the elegy, the mourning song,
reaches for what's missing or left behind,
like the woman who found the preacher
bleeding in his door,
or the one who knelt beside the clerk,
on the banks of a silence she could not ford,
or like the teenager, or like the finger,
or the fist it leaves behind as if to say
even memory can forget itself
and be written into another history,
while everyone is looking at something else.
The Caddies slide into the night
and are folded once again beneath their hoods.
The cheerleaders, the shriners and the quarterbacks
take off their suits and enter the crowds again,
and we drive through those streets
where the night, where the day falls
as indifferently as before.
We come over the bridge.
We do not look back.
We think of the girl as we pass,
and the finger we imagine still pointing the way.