Buckets Of Rain

It's raining and raining and raining today. Snowing everywhere else but here it's all rain. Buckets. No joke. And for every raindrop, there's a tear in the world. For the sweet children of Sandy Hook, for poet Jake Adam York, for those in Syria. There's even the murmur of Doomsday, the last day ever. And just for that, since life is too short, here's a little Dylan.

Buckets of rain
Buckets of tears
Got all them buckets coming out of my ears
Buckets of moonbeams in my hand
You got all the love honey baby
I can stand.

I been meek
And hard like an oak
I seen pretty people disappear like smoke
Friends will arrive friends will disappear
If you want me honey baby
I'll be here.

I like your smile
And your fingertips
I like the way that you move your hips
I like the cool way you look at me
Everything about you is bringing me
Misery.

Little red wagon
Little red bike
I ain't no monkey but I know what I like
I like the way you love me strong and slow
I'm taking you with me honey baby
When I go.

Life is sad
Life is a bust
All ya can do is do what you must
You do what you must do and ya do it well
I'll do it for you honey baby
Can't you tell?

Jake Adam York

In Memory of Jake Adam York - 1972-2012

Jake. Adam. York.  Three names, one poet.  Florida born, Alabama raised, and gone to Colorado to teach, edit, write.  Three volumes of poetry -- Murder Ballads, A Murmuration of Starlings, and Persons Unknown.  As Natasha Trethewey writes of Murmuration, his words are "fierce, beautiful, necessary." 

Self-Portrait of the Town Where I Was Born
West Palm Beach, Florida

The smell of the ocean,
the brine, must be

the first smell,
the smell of beginning.

Age is everything else.
Fish and skin,

asphalt and gasoline,
volatile as moonshine in the heat,

a shower's galvanized water 
peppering the air

and the ash of a campfire
the tide's raked out,

thin sugar of beer
and a tea of flotsam and bait

a wave could strew on the sand
and return to claim again.

A child climbs from the surf,
and we walk away.

We drive with the windows down,
beach and its high-rise barrier behind,

Belle Glade and Okeechobee
beyond the low storm of pines,

when the tang of hickory snares us,
pulls us over the tracks

and past the liquor store
to a squat block front,

its yard a wreck
of stumps and logs.

Inside, he menu's compendious--
conch, shrimp, crab--

and vinegar sharpens the air,
so strong for once

we forget the ocean.
We wait, almost alone.

A girl sits, opposite us,
baby on her shoulder.

As pitmen shout behind the counter,
as cleavers fall,

she watches us.
And then she asks

What y'all doing here?

The knives are moving,
but it seems quiet,

and I almost answer
I was born here,

almost say we came
to find that first place,

or we were lost
when we caught the smell,

or we were hungry
and someone showed us here.

But this is a question
of contrast, not motive.

This is the moment
we become visible,

when we emerge or develop,
the only whites in a block or two.

What would the camera see?
Wood paneling behind us,

wall sawed open for another AC,
sauce-red paint on all the sills,

peeling in the salt and breeze,
and someone,

there,
on the edge of the frame,

leaning on a car, as if watching
or talking back to me.

It's late,
and now everyone is watching,

waiting as I take a breath--
vinegar and brine

in the rising wind--
everyone waiting

for the sound I'll make,
the first word I'll say.

Copyright © 2010 Jake Adam York All rights reserved
from Persons Unknown 
Southern Illinois University Press 

Tribute to J.A.Y. - University of Colorado Denver

Where Do the Children Play?

For the children and the sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers, who will never stop wondering why. All they wanted was to run and laugh and count the jumps of their friends jumping rope. All they wanted was to hide - 8, 9, 10 - ready or not here I come! - and be found. All they wanted was cookies and milk after school, help with adding and subtracting, to be read to and tucked in at bedtime. All they wanted was to chase each other into the yard, look up, and watch the falling stars.

Where Do the Children Play?

For Clarence

Clarence Clemons.  

The heavens parted when he played: for Thunder Road, for Jungleland, for Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.  

Thank you Clarence, for sending my soul skyward.  May yours fly that way, too. 

http://www.youtube.com/Thunder Road_1976

https://www.youtube.com/Jungleland_Hyde Park_London_2009

Jeanne Leiby: A Way to Remember

Jeanne M. Leiby was an editor beyond editors. The first woman to head The Southern Review, she had enough heart and toughness to take on that task. When I first began submitting stories to literary reviews, I knew that, for The Southern Review, I'd have to wait for just the right story, one secure in setting, with characters balanced between rocks and hard places, with language surprising and new. And eventually I did send a story, which came back to me, and which some day I’ll return to and send again, once it’s earned the chance. Sadly, very sadly, Jeanne Leiby won’t be there to read it. Still, I look to her for guidance, and though she is gone, I find just that in her words—the words and lines and passages of her stories.

The stories in her collection, Downriver, are reflective, ribboning prisms of light, mirrored in the dusty windows of houses in Riverview and Wyandotte, under the smokestacks of the BASF plant. Downriver Detroit is the landscape by which her characters find a way, where they wrestle with each other—from the father who thinks he has broken his daughter to the boy who loses an arm, from the woman who craves human contact which is rough and raw to the eight-year-old girl who wants to slip inside the fearlessness of a mistrusted teenager. Place is not kind here: it is rocky, hard, and angled with decisions that hurt. Out of the harshness of place, however, arises a caring, beholden handling of characters. Just there is a man who treasures his children, but has no idea how to approach them. And there, on another side of town, is a girl too young to know lust, but recognizes in herself the same kind of hunger for risk and danger that older, unloved girls invite. Even their names unveil the possibility and the peril inherent in this place—names like Anna and Ingo, Joseph, Al Rosa, Benny and Trini, Nyla and Petie.  These characters are so real that it seems as though we know them, we understand them, until we are them, the taste of the river in our mouths.

The language here twists in evocative, unusual ways, the kind that trace ideas and images back to their origins, that cut though chain link and back yards and lead straight into bedrooms where things are whispered and overheard. There are moments that pull the narrative down and then send it spiraling out, in directions unexpected and upended. These moments arrive without protection, asking to be further exposed, like in Joseph’s wish for a pattern in the bathroom tile work, “something cryptic and Egyptian… something to say, ‘Come rescue us because we are all certainly dying.’” [1] And farther out, at 3 a.m. from her fourth-floor balcony, Anna measures her desire for punishment in the river’s length and breadth, recalling her father’s “primary rule of the river…  Red, right, returning. Remember that. And you’ll never get lost,” [2} and in this way realizes that leaving has always brought her back. And then in the twilight of a side yard, young Petie wants to bathe in the wicked light that Trini throws, wants “to squeeze out all that danger, see it… in a puddle, run through it in [her] father’s work boots, and dance footprints all over the white living-room rug.” [3] Bare, unburdened language holds these characters and allows them a way to open themselves, which in turn opens up the stories.

Downriver is a gift from which to remember Jeanne. Though she can’t give us more words, what she has given is immeasurable. There is grit and rocky ground and disquiet in her writing that reveals so much about the writer, so much about her imagined world, its shadow far greater than even those of the BASF smokestacks. Her stories and characters keep her memory alive, and grant us a place to return, a place to come “back, and back, and back.” [4]

[1] “A Place Alone,” 17.

[2] “Vinegar Tasting,” 30.

[3] “Nike Site,” 40.

[4] “Nike Site,” 40.