Before Knowing Remembers
Oxford, Mississippi
Day pulls back into its sleeves,
slipping its fingers from the banisters
and door handles. It’s going now
like a drunk, erratic, slow,
losing itself in the trees,
leaving us in shadow on the Square
where the stone Confederate
keeps my eye. Imagine
always walking over the open earth,
coming back alone, snuggling
nights in a ditch
and piling the leaves over you
to bank your fire. If I
could reach him now, I’m sure
I’d feel the chill, his boots
cold as another beer. I’m waiting
for the cool on a barroom balcony,
half-listening while someone else
is talking about our Johnny Reb,
just one of thousands, she says,
if the story can be believed,
North and South, same stance,
same molded face—
only their hats are different
she says, as if to say, don’t believe
it all, Mississippi of butternut
and cotton, though even that,
the caution’s local, a conversation
that won’t be happening
in too many other towns.
Her companion’s all linen and buff
and sharp Van Dyke,
but for the neck tattoo
a fair portrait of General Lee.
Another studied irony.
I can see him in a reenactor’s jacket
cranking a strat through some Delta blues,
and I realize that’s what he wants,
what we all want, anything
to keep history on the move,
so we can be Americans,
or just the kind of Southerners
we think we ought to be.
Behind them, just inside
the doors, Robert Johnson’s muraled
in his midnight meet, Satan
either imminent
or already gone. The only way
to know is to look past
that graveyard of a smile
and down the throat, to find
the cradle of song either empty
or aflame.
The mouth is open
and you know that music,
but you can’t hear a thing.
*
Mississippi’s thumping now
the way you do
after five rounds, or six,
the cast-iron night
rank as guitar strings
coiled in sweat. Two doors down,
a hill-country trio’s set
to work it all night long,
their blues insistent, entrancing.
Slowly, you’re drawn
into that pulse,
down the stairs, then pulled into
some mercantile’s upper room,
now stomped into a juke,
where skin touches skin
and every song’s a weave of limbs
no one owns. Sweet amnesia
of smoke and beer, a fire
that burns, a cup that cools,
that room is a heaven
where heat forgets the sun,
where legs forget their walking
down a road or a row
of cotton or acres and acres
of ornamental lawns, where
you can forget that posture,
those words, that weight,
a lecture hall with a window
on the ground where
the newsman lay, the Frenchman
with a bullet in his back
and a black rope of blood
to tie him to the night
while the hurry just passes by,
a rush of arms and faces
who will take your pain.
Holler and strobe, we come together
in a downtown room,
through a door anyone can take
into this prayer-meeting warmth
though no one’s asked
which god it’s for. It’s September
and we’re dancing, everyone
is dancing, and this
is how a town forgets,
by becoming what it didn’t want
to be. You take
what’s offered, you give the same,
a neck ready for someone’s arms,
someone else’s warmth still
in the sleeves. Slowly you’re carried,
breath and pulse and flesh,
out into the night,
where the courthouse and its soldier
bask in their halogens, the magnolias
and sidewalks slick
with rain, the light
nervous on your skin. On the pavement
the water’s gathering
to rise like tear-gas,
steam’s rags regular as the riff
you still hear, pulled apart
in the bluesman’s hands, hands
old enough to know that night,
decades back, and the other,
the juke-box repairman
shot dead in the campus riot,
then slid back together,
that time infallible and perpetual
through the vapor, the smoke.
Part of you must still be there
in that room, just waiting
for him to catch your eye
through the brawl, and now
he does, raising his pick hand
into a pistol, and then
he cocks the thumb
and points it right at you.
*
The music never stops,
never really goes away,
but people fall back into themselves
and leave, walking away
through the fog, toward campus
or the cemetery or sleepier streets.
They’re mostly silhouettes,
densities in the powdery light.
I’m watching next to Faulkner’s
bronze, on the bench
that replaced the one he kept
each afternoon, where he marked
the county’s comings and goings,
but now the Square’s
as much like a Life magazine
as Light in August, and I think
this is how a town remembers,
when no one’s looking
but the statues, the soldier
and the writer
who must have seen it coming,
who knew how two people
can struggle in a body,
a house, a town, and how a place
won’t recognize itself
until the story’s nearly over.
That night,
before the first gun was pulled,
before the first window
broke, Meredith
was already there, sleeping
in a dorm in a vacant part
of campus, the half-exhausted
light barely touching him.
He slept well, he says.
He didn’t hear a thing.
They are all sleeping now,
all of them, in houses
like these, becoming pictures
of themselves, street-light sepia
and salted pale,
or downhill in St. Peter’s, beneath
their pillars and stones.
All night, people come
to leave their roses
or pour whiskey into the letters
of someone else’s name,
leaving that smell in the crape
of the cedar trees. And sometimes
a mockingbird will wake
from the solid calm and spill
whatever it’s heard, as if
it gathered what’s mumbled
in dreams and now
it’s giving everything back to the air
and the streetlamps if it goes on
long enough, and the world starts
moving again, wrens and robins
and all the rest, the houses
coalescing from the dark.
Each night, we drift,
we are taken out of ourselves
and we forget, until
something like this
puts us back in a sentence
or a story of the world,
in a quiet room or a graveyard
where none of the names
are ours again,
where the light reaches slowly
out of itself and wakes us,
like a hand on our hands,
remembered warmth
on our skin.
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 while alive–Murder Ballads (Elixir Press, 2005), A Murmuration of Starlings (SIU Press, 2008), and Persons Unknown (SIU Press, 2010)–and Abide posthumously (SIU Press, 2014; winner of the 2015 Colorado Book Award and finalist for 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award).“Before Knowing Remembers” originally appeared in the journal Third Coast and then Jake’s book Persons Unknown. It is reprinted by permission of SIU Press and with the blessing of Sarah Skeen, Jon Tribble, Nicky Beer, and Brian Barker.
Read poetry by Jake Adam York appearing in Terrain.org, as well as his essay “Recovery: Learning the Music of History.”
Header photo of streetlamps and fog by B-Linda, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Jake Adam York by Jack Zweck-Bronner.
