Abide: Poems by Jake Adam York (Crab Orchard Poetry) - Softcover

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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.