Abide

by Jake Adam York

Overview

Winner, 2015 Colorado Book Award
Finalist, 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award

In the years leading up to his recent passing, Alabama poet Jake Adam York set out on a journey to elegize the 126 martyrs of the civil rights movement, murdered in the years between 1954 and 1968. Abide is the stunning follow-up to York’s earlier volumes, a memorial in verse for those fallen. From Birmingham to Okemah, Memphis to Houston, York’s poems both mourn and inspire in their quest for justice, ownership, and understanding.

Within are anthems to John Earl Reese, a sixteen-year-old shot by Klansmen through the window of a café in Mayflower, Texas, where he was dancing in 1955; to victims lynched on the Oklahoma prairies; to the four children who perished in the Birmingham church bombing of 1963; and to families who saw the white hoods of the Klan illuminated by burning crosses. Juxtaposed with these horrors are more loving images of the South: the aroma of greens simmering on the stove, “tornado-strong” houses built by loved ones long gone, and the power of rivers “dark as roux.” 

Throughout these lush narratives, York resurrects the ghosts of Orpheus, Sun Ra, Howlin’ Wolf, Thelonious Monk, Woody Guthrie, and more, summoning blues, jazz, hip-hop, and folk musicians for performances of their “liberation music” that give special meaning to the tales of the dead.

In the same moment that Abide memorializes the fallen, it also raises the ethical questions faced by York during this, his life’s work: What does it mean to elegize? What does it mean to elegize martyrs? What does it mean to disturb the symmetries of the South’s racial politics or its racial poetics?

A bittersweet elegy for the poet himself, Abide is as subtle and inviting as the whisper of a record sleeve, the gasp of the record needle, beckoning us to heed our history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809333271
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	03/06/2014
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Until his untimely death in December 2012, Jake Adam York was an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado-Denver. He published three books of poems, Murder Ballads (2005), A Murmuration of Starlings (SIU Press, 2008), and Persons Unknown (SIU Press, 2010), and his poems appeared in various journals, including Blackbird, Diagram, Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, H_NGM_N, New Orleans Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Review.

Read an Excerpt

ABIDE WITH ME

Fast falls the light.
Through the trees, the windows.
Through valances and dust.
Its fingers thin.
Its fingers flatten
and blush. One hand
on the cover, one
on my breath, you
ease me to the hour
when the clock forgets
its hands, a dream
of a lake I'd swim
years before we met
and the boathouse where I'd lie
inches from the water,
drying in afternoon.
You shake the light
from your shoulders,
it falls to the floor,
to the water where I swam
when the lake was my clock,
my dream, no hour,
no hands but yours,
if they dream us here.
The stereo takes back our breath.
All sound is light.
Your fingers pulling back
the dust, the curtains.
Pull back the curtains,
pull back the day
so we can fall
breathless into night.


POSTSCRIPT
—For Medgar Evers

I didn't want to write this,
even to think of you,
afraid the thought would curl,
would tangle and make you
common and factual as light.
So I've waited,
hands, pencils down.
Now that seems a prayer
against the world and being in it.
That is why he waited
in the bushes. That is a prayer
the closed eyes say.
This is not the afterimage
but the image of day
on paper, in its pores,
new light that shows the edges,
so nothing can be hid,
even if the words curl like hair,
even if they curl like vine.
Again, today, the light is new,
and because you are nowhere
you are everywhere,
in the face of which I'd ask
how can I say anything,
in the face of which I ask
how can I say nothing at all?


EXPLODED VIEW

While he slept, I read my father's books
brought home from the furnace,
traced the diagrams-channels, ladles of iron,

oxygen lances-trying to follow
the metal's path, to follow the work
that took him each night into the dark-

flame to the coal's dark, the dark
gone bright while the rest of us slept.
The door closed like a storybook. . . .

While he worked, the furnace flamed
in dream, and I tried to follow
through the swarm of yellowjackets,

hot wings of iron, but they were just
outlines in my dream, dream,
not iron, not fire in the dark-just spray

from one rare story I tried to follow.
I tried to follow, but even he
didn't want to go, not even

in story, the blanks in the books'
diagrams all ash, all flame. All silence,
they seemed to say. But silence

is a furnace, too, where work
disappears, where breath is turned
to iron. And night is a furnace, too,

where sleep, where dark are burned away
like words until the books are blank
and there's nothing left to follow.

I tried, listening as he eased the stairs,
clicked the door, then drove away,
his engine lost in the trains' low drone,

strained to hear him turning,
ten miles away, pages in the book of iron,
the story he told by not telling,

the dark in which the furnace always rests.
So, the furnace is a father, too,
whose story you cannot follow,

a shadow sitting loud in the dark,
while the quiet hardens in his lungs.

And the father is a story, too,
you cannot follow,
a book fed slowly to the fire,

a fire, worked, at last,
to two black tongues of iron.


POSTSCRIPT TO SILENCE

After the palm has clasped the hot, white
iron, the pain whispers slow
as the march of torches up the ridge.
Perverse lava, flowing up,
pine knots flicker their shirts, their hoods,
white as eschar. You hear
the crackle, the whip, later on.
Here, lips part but make no sound.
Words suppurate slowly, halving
then halving their distance to your ears,
moving like bees in a cry of amber.
How old will you be when they arrive,
when you remember the tissue
your mother brought to her tears,
watching the fire climb through the window,
how white it was, when you remember
the sound of what you did not hear?
That's when you'll feel the burn,
when you'll feel the shape of those words,
even the ones she could not say.

Table of Contents

Abide with Me 1

te lyra pulsa manu or something like that 2

Epistrophy 5

Letter to Be Wrapped around a 12-Inch Disc 8

Letter Hidden in a Letter to Cy Twombly 14

Postscript 16

Mayflower 17

Letter Written on a Hundred Dollar Bill 19

Letter Written on a Record Sleeve 21

Abide 25

Postscript Written on a J-Card 27

Exploded View 31

My Great-Grandmother's Snuff Cup 33

Feedback Loop 34

Letter Written in Black Water and Pearl 35

Laws of Conservation 38

Cry of the Occasion 39

The Voice of Woody Guthrie Wakes in an Antenna in Okemah, Oklahoma 41

Letter from Okemah 46

Postscript to Silence 49

Letter Already Broadcast into Space 50

Abide 53

Letter Written in the Breath 54

Inscription for Air 59

Dear Brother 61

Tape Loop 63

Letter Written in Someone Else's Hand 65

Letter Written in the Dark 67

Postscript (Already Breaking in Distant Echoes) 72

Letter to Be Read by Furnace Light 74

Foreword to a Subsequent Reading 79

Acknowledgments 81

Editorial Reviews

"Though York is no longer with us to write and share his poetry and insight, we are able to continue and advance as people by reading his work—to continue and advance as citizens, human siblings,
and ushers of art."—Rain Taxi

“In his body of work, poems of sheer beauty, grace, precision of image, and technical skill, we find a profound intervention into our ongoing conversations about race and social justice, a bold and necessary challenge to our historical amnesia. Jake Adam York is one of our most indispensible American poets, and the presence of his work in the world—his vision, his enduring spirit—is for me, and I think for us all, a guiding light.”—Natasha Trethewey, United States Poet Laureate

“Jake Adam York was the finest elegist of his generation, and his ongoing project, an intricately layered threnody for the martyrs of the civil rights movement, also made him one of the most ambitious poets of that generation. And surely his early and sudden death was an immense loss to the poetry of our moment. It is thus bittersweet to observe that this posthumous collection is his finest—informed by a tender lyric acuity, and an ability to interweave the fraught history of his native South with an autobiographical authority that is searching and celebratory by turns. Abide is, in short, a marvel.”—David Wojahn

"There’s a reason why antebellum mansions still serve, not as museums dealing with the ugliness of slavery, but as popular backdrops for wedding receptions, the kind celebrated by Paula Deen recreating the 'glory' of Gone With the Wind and it has everything to do with an unwillingness to deal with the past openly and honestly… York’s poetry is important because of the way that it attacks that unresolved history and refuses to let the longstanding narrative go unchallenged, and it does so from a position of power that makes it difficult for the privileged to ignore it the way they do similar work from poets of color who work in the same thematic spaces."—The Rumpus

From the Publisher