16 pages • 32 minutes read
June JordanPoem for Haruko
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
To Keep a Record
Record-keeping in general does not lend itself to romance, so it is an unusual choice of language with which to begin a love poem. One might keep a memento of a beloved—maybe even snatch a small something when they aren’t looking—but to keep a record implies a drier, far less passionate action. It’s easy to picture a bookkeeping ledger, with line items carefully delineated in their appropriate columns. In “Poem for Haruko,” the first line says, “I never thought I’d keep a record of my pain” (Line 1). Happiness doesn’t appear until the second line. It is the inclusion of pain that makes this record something other than mere inventory. “To have a record” is to be identified—in some circled, defined—by one’s crimes. It is better, in this sense, to have no record at all.
To keep a record implies an attention to the facts and a desire to go over them again at some point, perhaps to prove a point. Another reason to keep a record is to shore up memory. With documentation, that which wants to fade may be re-inked in the brain.
As the tone of “Poem for Haruko” is one of melancholy and perhaps regret, the record-keeping the speaker at first dismissed and now practices becomes something viscerally emotional. The speaker “retrieve(s)” (Line 11) a happy memory from the beach but “relive(s) an evening of retreat” (Line 20) from a passionate relationship. The stakes get higher the closer the speaker comes to the point of dissolution, but they insist on remembering it all, even memories as “cruel” (Line 24) as they are “kind” (Line 24), as that is a way to hold the truth of a love that has been lost. Passion alters one’s perception, “spins its infinite / tergiversations in between the bitter / and the sweet” (Lines 25-27). The record will play it all back.
The Span of Time
Time—and, more specifically, the past—is invoked from the very beginning of “Poem for Haruko.” The phrase, “I never thought” (Line 1) indicates a certain way of thinking in the continuous past, as in, “For most of my life (or youth, or childhood), I never thought.” The phrase also implies a change of heart, though that change is not affirmed until the second stanza. While the span of time is not exact in the first stanza, the “candles” (Line 3) provide a built-in measure of time, as a candle can only burn for so long before it is spent.
The speaker offers a sense of time and its passage in the second stanza by summoning the image of an afternoon on the beach. What’s more, the lovers are present at “the low tide / of the world” (Lines 17-18), an event that corresponds to the rotation of the Earth. The tempo of this stanza is slow and easy, indicating a correspondingly easy time in the relationship. Even the positioning of the line “How easily you held” (Line 15) suspends time for a moment, drifting into the page, away from the left margin.
The “evening” (Line 20) of the poem arrives in the third stanza, where the closing of the day echoes the end of the relationship. As the Earth spins, “passion spins” (Line 25), although the spinnings of passion cannot be interpreted as clearly as the Earth’s rotations. Time does not equivocate. In the last line of the poem, the speaker positions themself and the reader in the “now” (Line 29). In the present moment, they are “Alone and longing” (Line 28) for their lover, long gone. Long is an expression of time, in this case, imprecise and bittersweet.
The Bitter and the Sweet
Bittersweet refers to a fullness of experience—both this and that, yin and yang—a state of being that encompasses a spectrum of emotions, polarizing in the extremes. The speaker in “Poem for Haruko” begins—at some point after the dissolution of the relationship—to “keep a record” Line 1) of their “pain / and happiness” (Line 1-2). The first memory they relate is so beautiful as to invoke the divine. Memory is “like candles” (Line 3), imbuing the atmosphere—“the entire soft lace / of the air” (Lines 3-4, italics added). This halo illuminates the beloved’s hair, whose “undulations” (Line 8) flicker like fire. There is the light that cannot last, and there is the fire that cannot be touched. It is all beautiful and finite and, in some way, ungraspable.
In the second stanza the speaker recalls apricots—sweet—and cigarettes—bitter. The lovers walk over sand—cool if adjacent to the water, and warm if higher on the beach—and rocks—sharper and potentially more difficult to walk over. The world may be at “low tide” (Line 17), but there is infinite sweetness in the holding of one another’s hand.
The third stanza leaps to the end, or the beginning of the end, of the relationship. The speaker is the one to retreat, the one who fails to cross the “bridge” (Line 21) from one side to another. They abandon the equation altogether, leaving behind “all the solid heat and tender trembling” (Lines 22-23); heat, here, represents a formidable force—the pressing of bodies—while to tremble might be a reaction to the cold or to the coming apart of bodies after. These elements of passion encompass—as well as act within—all the space between cruelty and kindness. The speaker acknowledges that people run hot and cold and in the throes of a great passion are capable of infinite tenderness as well as gross injury. The speaker seems to have been capable, too, of disassociating, as demonstrated by their retreat. In the lover’s absence, the speaker seeks to mine memory for the details of their history without missing anything, good or bad.
