Jake Adam York is a fifth-generation Alabamian, raised in and around Gadsden, in Etowah County. Currently, he is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado Denver. His books include Murder Ballads, selected by Jane Satterfield for the 2005 Elixir Prize in Poetry, and A Murmuration of Starlings (2008 Southern Illinois University Press) selected by Cathy Song for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and winner of the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry. He was the recipient of a 2002 Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship and was the 2009 Summer Poet in Residence at the University of Mississippi. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, Oxford American, and Cincinnati Review.

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 “…Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

 

 It’s not even summer yet and already

the edges of everything are burning —

 

the hard-packed streets, the dry goods store,

the telegraph pole and the hickory tree

 

where two men hang in this photograph,

which the paper calls the verdict of all —

 

even the paper, even the sky.

But no one looks. Only the lens

 

has their attention now, who have gathered

to be witnessed as they witness,

 

among them maybe even the men

whose names escape us even now,

 

who pulled Slayton from the court,

the closing argument in their hands,

 

maybe too the judge who watched

or the jailer who opened Miles’s cell

 

but stood quiet when the rope went up,

and maybe even the outraged,

 

the women who named them, maybe

even they are here, one

 

beneath a parasol in the bosom of the town,

another just beneath the tree,

 

with her children, at the roots

where the crowd parts so perfectly,

 

so the camera can capture all —

even the one who’s climbed the tree

 

to pose the faces of the dead —

so the camera can hold

 

and return their gaze, their perspective’s law,

in a portrait of certainty,

 

of the verdict that finds its vertex,

that finds its ground, its fact, its reason

 

in you.

What’s missing is thin as a warrant,

 

a page of salt the light has burned

to a midnight scene,

 

a Negro town gathered

beneath a bright-leafed tree

 

where two men hang, their faces

a blinding, silvery white. This

 

is the if that city imagines,

or the otherwise, a world

 

lit by a different vision, a different law

and power, a nightmare they cannot allow

 

except as counsel, a moment

certainty must destroy in order to endure.

 

This picture, this pane, this inverse of order

must be held, must be hung

 

before the proper light, enlarger’s lamp

or best, the blare of day

 

in which it can thin to a whisper,

a vapor, a wisp of smoke, a rumor

 

that hangs like an exhalation, a ghost

you see when you close your eyes.

 

But there is no negative

 

until the sun burns this all away,

this scrim of nitre and salt and skin,

 

and the ash and metal scatter

like breath—until even the afterimage is gone

 

and there is nothing,

or there is everything,

 

a river without its bodies,

a hill without its mob, and streets

 

like this one where the trees

hold only their leaves—

 

a street like this one

where you can stand alone in thought,

 

where an afternoon or an August

can be an easy pause or a patience

 

in which nothing need be said,

in which nothing need happen after all

 

except the sky and its clouds

like so many facts, drifting free,

 

dissipating then collecting again,

so many words written in water

 

or air or breath, syllables that burn away

when you open your eyes again.