Jake Adam York Remembered

With sadness, we at Blackbird note the death of Jake Adam York. We were fortunate to be able to publish York’s work, to hear him read, and to count him as a friend. In this feature, Susan Settlemyre Williams praises his remarkable poetry in her essay, “Man of Fire: The Poetry of Jake Adam York,” and Leia Darwish remembers a teacher and mentor in “No Comparable Warmth.”

We also link to work that appears in previous issues, including poems, reviews of his work, and an audio of an interview in which Blackbird senior editor Gregory Donovan speaks to York about elegy, race, and documentary poetics in York’s first collection Murder Ballads .

York’s poem “Vigil” appeared in Blackbird v3n2 and represents well his ongoing project to memorialize and provide a voice for the martyrs of the civil rights movement.

The bike, the handlebars, the fork, spoked wheels still spinning off sun,

still letting go his weight as he lay in the grass along Docena Road

just hours after the bomb went off under the church steps downtown,

four girls dead, though they hadn't heard, Virgil with a bullet in his heart, Virgil Ware

who wanted a bike for a paper-route who perched on his brother's handlebars

and caught the white boys' bullet but never got a bike or a headstone

or a 14th birthday, Virgil and his brother and the bike in the grass off Docena Road.

The handlebars, fork, and iron diamond frame that held them both, warming

in the Alabama sun. Stars of paint and chrome that rained all over north Birmingham,

up and down the Docena-Sandusky road, nesting like crickets in the weeds.

And the seat, wearing at the edges, the cushion opening like a cattail

to the wind. But the frame, still holding handed down and down and down

till bright as a canna. Then laid with its brothers in a tangle in the sun.

Then gathering heat and darkening. Then weeds insinuating the fork,

the sprocket, the pedal, each iron artery, working back toward the light.

Let their flowers open from the mouths of the handlebars and the seat-post.

Let them be gathered from the frame and the frame raised up. Let it be

hot to the touch. Let its rust burn into the finest creases of the hand

and the warp of the shirtsleeve and the pants and worked into the temples' sweat.

Then let it descend into the furnace like a hand that opens all its rivers, each tribute,

each channel, each buried town. Let it gather this heat, this fire, hold it all.

Let the crucible door open like a mouth and speak its bloom of light, molten and new.

Let me stand in its halo. Let me stand as it pours out its stream of suns.

Let me gather and hold it like a brother. And let it burn.