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Circe by Nicelle Davis
 Stunning New Poetry From Associate Poetry Editor Nicelle Davis |
| Jake Adam York - Poetry |
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.
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