Jake Adam York

Colorado poet, writer, and editor Jake Adam York (1972-2012) was represented on this site and his information has been left up as testimonial to his life and work.

Jake Adam York

Negatives

Townspeople gathered for the burning of John Lee. August 13, 1911 , Durant , Oklahoma . Gelatin silver print. Real photo postcard. 5½ x 3½”

 

You cannot see the body

each eye fixes, the focus

 

of the plume that angles every head,

John Lee, curling skyward

 

from the fire,

a town’s worth of bullets

 

searing white in the char

that was a man, gunned down

 

and set ablaze. John Lee

will burn till sundown,

 

till ash and a few charred parcels,

till the crowd disbands and spreads

 

to the corners of the town

now shut of every black,

 

and poor Miss Campbell’s poor white soul

drifts, avenged, to heaven

 

till the photographer bends to his film

to darken the postcard caption,

 

block letters that will blaze white

COON COOKING — the barbecue

 

one will later describe

on the opposite side. But for now

 

you can see only smoke

and the appetite on the faces

 

closest to the heat,

the desperate arching of a body

 

eager for a glimpse of the gravity,

the magnetism of this powerless man.

 

But let us imagine

just afterward, the camera slung

 

on the taker’s shoulder,

and at its heart a thousand blacks

 

staring into this cloud of light,

for a moment neither

 

gathering toward nor

descending from heaven,

 

but waiting in their adoration

and blessing each with its glow —

 

a vision of these thousand whites

turned dark for an hour

 

and praying, terrified, to this pillar

for the rectifying light

 

and then imagine,

their prayer, the paper

 

slowly darkening in the light

until they are restored, white from dark,

 

but the cloud now a dark tornado

caught on the verge of breaking through,

 

ready to consume each watcher

until all there is is this plume,

 

the body enlarged,

 

its ash, a thousand postcards

of a world he dared not dream he dreamed,

 

signed with the names of all who watch,

ready to inscribe the scene

 

Wish you were here.

 

originally appeared in Quarterly West (2004)