Poem for Haruko

“Poem for Haruko” by June Jordan is a love poem. Originally published in the 1994 collection Haruko: Love Poems from High Risk Books, the poem also appears in Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (2005). Written in unrhymed free verse, the poem consists of three stanzas containing nine lines each, plus a final couplet. Line lengths vary widely throughout the poem. The speaker speaks from a first-person point of view. It is a love poem but for a beloved who is no longer present; in this way the mood of the poem is elegiac, or melancholy.

In the first line of the poem, the speaker says, “I never thought I’d keep a record” (Line 1), which indicates the speaker has undergone a change. The implication is that the speaker’s former (younger) self was not the type to document life as it was happening. She didn’t think herself the kind of person who would keep track of every high and low, to preserve life’s moments of joy and sorrow for perusal at some distant, less vital future moment. For the speaker, “a record” (Line 1) looks less like a bookkeeping ledger than a vision: “candles lighting the entire soft lace / of the air” (Lines 3-4). This candlelit handiwork surrounds the long tresses of the speaker’s lover, “a shower / organized by God” (Lines 5-6). In the lace that recalls the mantilla of pious women attending mass, to the invocation of God, this memory represents a deep experience, one that is spiritual as well as physical. It is, as well, a memory that burns, as desire burns—the waves of hair resemble “particles / of flame” (Lines 8-9).

In the second stanza, the speaker completes the implied change in attitude. They “never thought” (Line 1) they’d catalogue these memories, “[b]ut now I do” (Line 10). It is the first of three times the speaker will utter this statement in the course of the poem. The second stanza offers a more particular scene. The speaker remembers “an afternoon of apricots / and water interspersed with cigarettes” (Line 11-12). It was a lovely day on the beach, languorous and easy. The lovers held hands while they walked. There is a sense of easy affection between them. At the same time, the speaker lets the reader know that despite a scenario of carefree romantic indolence, the lovers walked “beside the low tide / of the world” (Lines 17-18). In one sense, low tide is when the water at the shore is at its shallowest point and easy to navigate. In another sense, low tide means the lowest state of something; it is the point of maximum decline. Also, low tide exposes decaying phytoplankton and the bacteria that eat it, resulting in a sulphureous smell. Another aspect of the low-tide smell is the presence of dictyopterenes, the sex pheromones of seaweed eggs, designed to attract sperm. Low tide, then, is an earthy mix of life and death.

The third stanza introduces the occasion of the end of the relationship, or at least the moment when the speaker begins her “retreat” (Line 20). Whereas on the beach the speaker and her beloved “walked across” (Line 14) the sandy, rocky terrain with ease, in the third stanza of catalogued memory, the speaker will not cross but will back away from the “bridge I left behind” (Line 21). They leave behind, as well, all the stuff of their great passion—“the solid heat / of lust and tender trembling” (Lines 22-23). A flame flickers, impossible to hold, but the body in sexual intimacy can be said to be in a state of “solid heat” (Line 22), accessible to touch.

In the third stanza, the speaker offers the reader the dichotomies of passionate love—cruelty and kindness, “the bitter / and the sweet” (Lines 26-27), and, of course, there is that two-dollar word, “tergiversations” (Line 26). Tergiversation, according to Merriam-Webster, is defined as an equivocation, or an “evasion of straightforward action or clear-cut statement.” In addition, it can mean the abandonment of a cause, or a desertion of faith. Tergiversation implies fence-sitting, indecision, unwillingness, and perhaps cowardice. The word suggests language that refuses clarity, language that deliberately obfuscates to avoid a solid truth.

In “Poem for Haruko,” it is passion itself that “spins its infinite / tergiversations” (Lines 25-26), not the speaker (though they, too, may be unable to commit). Great passion at this point of the romance cannot commit to being one thing or the other; it ricochets between pain and pleasure, happiness and misery. In the last couplet, however, the speaker is anything but ambiguous about her feelings. In their loneliness and yearning for their lost lover, they wholly adopt the contractual language of many a commitment ceremony: “I do” (Line 29). If the speaker cannot be with their beloved in the flesh, they can yet devote themself to the preservation of their memories, both “the bitter / and the sweet” (Lines 26-27).