Jake Adam York is the author of three books of poems—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 numerous literary journals including The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, New South, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, The Northwest Review, and Poetry Daily. An associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, York co-edits Copper Nickel. In 2009, York was the University of Mississippi’s Summer Poet in Residence, and in 2011, he was the Richard Thomas Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College. He is a 2011-2012 Visiting Faculty Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. He is also the author of a work of literary criticism, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry, published by Routledge in 2005. He is currently at work on a book of poems entitled Abide and a critical study of artistic responses to the Civil Rights Movement entitled Monument and Memento.
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‘Round Midnight
Thelonious Monk at The Five Spot, July 7, 1958
Glasses waiting to be taken back,
the sweat on the everyone’s
forehead, the piano’s lacquer,
the photos and album sleeves
tacked on every wall
ashen as fireworks’ afterward,
phosphorous fading as it falls
from the night
to the beach fires left for the tide
to rake out, threads of smoke
rising as if to make kites of the stars,
or the cloud over the stage,
catching the glow like a fingernail,
a cymbal, like the sax’s bell,
the light from the bar rinses everything,
even the bronze-coiled strings
of the piano that have been waiting
like the tendons of the hand
for a pulse to wake them
to translate light to sound
so when you play you’re playing light
and every surface hums, every
voice and conversation bent and blending in,
and the light from the bar
is what all these words that have been said
so many times no one thinks about them
any more than the straw of a cigarette,
the light from the bar is what
all these words look like or leave behind,
ash that might be blown back into a flame,
a feeling or an afterthought
that might be brought back
to the tongue to remember itself
into the sentence it wanted to be.
And it is always what you should have said
that brings you back
to this moment as if it hadn’t passed,
the way you choose a song
you’ve played so many times, a song
you’ve heard so many times
that even when you’re playing it
you might forget who you are
and almost become someone else,
feeling old hands in your own
and feeling your hands inside those
ghost hands inside your hands,
like feeling your wise tongue
inside the dumb tongue
your tongue remembers being,
hope inside embarrassment inside of breath
you couldn’t hold if you wanted
which is what lets you return
to the swelter of language no matter
how many times you’ve gone dim,
like the day you turned the page to see
the face of Emmett Till
swollen with river and all the words
you couldn’t say
the let the page fall back into the book,
into quiet, knowing
you could raise it again,
which is why you come back,
how you can return with all that memory
and crib what you should have said
to the photograph of yourself
as gently as the light
fluoresces on the glass to remind it
of the whiskey, the spirit
that’s left with someone else.
Somewhere behind you, you know,
if you turned, if you walked out
through the room,
is a glass still waiting on a table,
lipstick’s clef the husk of a word
you didn’t hear, and you know,
after you’ve gone
this light will keep its vigil,
holding its breath until
the filament breaks and the glass
gives back that air
of another afternoon, breathes it
on the back of the chair
or the piano’s lacquer
you can still see
though you are somewhere else,
though you are there.