Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Who are your closest friends? How do you express your gratitude to them? Do you visit or call them late at night? Do they receive your gifts on their birthdays? I am such a slacker, but all my friends know this. They give me a pass, which is also an expression of our bonds. They know I love them, that if I have a chance to tell them when we are together, they will hear it.

My friends represent one of my greatest blessings on earth. I am empty without their compassion. Beyond obvious acts of charity, my friends also make sure I do not take myself or the world too seriously. They make me accountable to myself, my career, and my family. They encourage me to take risks but also advise against rash decisions.

Do not get us to laughing. The camaraderie between us electrifies the spaces we move in. This past summer, six of us sat in the back of a restaurant in Rome. The room was filled with tearful laughter. Our interests run so parallel and deep we enter into conversations that run hours. How many times I have stayed up late nursing blissful exchanges and ideas, buoyed by that amazing feeling of getting closer to solving the worlds’ problems.

This was not always the case. I suffered, in my youth, an inability to be vulnerable. Expressing feelings cut against the codes of the society I grew up in. This is such a cliché but it's true. Poetry, and poets, teased out of me a tenderness that I strongly hold onto. Poetry has endowed me with so many astonishing people whose sense of humor and intelligence has added to the richness of living.

One such person died all too early. I think frequently about my friend Jake Adam York. His humanity was defined by his sense of justice, a core belief in the music of the world, and his support of young writers. The great consolation is that we have his poems to remember him by.

Today’s poem, like so many of Jake’s poems, sees existence as a fleeting encounter of sublime immensity — one where we intertwine with the natural world, such that we have no other choice, but to awaken to all life around us.

Abide
by Jake Adam York

Forgive me if I forget
with the birdsong and the day’s
last glow folding into the hands
of the trees, forgive me the few 
syllables of the autumn crickets,
the year’s last firefly winking
like a penny in the shoulder’s weeds.
if I forget the hour, if I forget
the day as the evening star
pours out its whiskey over the gravel 
and asphalt I’ve walked 
for years alone, if I startle
when you put your hand in mine, 
if I wonder how long your light 
has taken to reach me here. 

“Abide” by Jake Adam York from ABIDE © 2014 Jake Adam York. Used by permission of Southern Illinois University Press.