Today I received an e-mail from someone at Mills regarding a memorial service for poet June Jordan who died last spring.
The letter included a poem that Jordan wrote shortly before her death from breast cancer.
As I read it, sitting here beneath flourescent lights with the chill of an air-conditioner raising my skin into goose bumps - all the while trying to avoid the newspaper, TV and certain Web sites because of what I know they'll do to me, I thought it might be appropriate to share on today of all days....
(if you are interested, the memorial service is this Saturday, Sept. 15 from 1-3pm in the Wheeler Hall Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis).

ON A NEW YEAR'S EVE

Infinity doesn't interest me

not altogether
anymore

I crawl and kneel and grub about
I beg and listen for

what can go away
(as easily as love)

or perish
like the children
running
hard on oneway streets/infinity
doesn't interest me

not anymore

not even
repetition your/my/eye-
lid or the colorings of sunrise
or all the sky excitement
added up

is not enough

to satisfy this lusting admiration that I feel
for
your brown arm before it
moves

MOVES
CHANGES UP

the temporary sacred
tales ago
first bikeride round the house
when you first saw a squat
opossum
carry babies on her back

opossum up
in the persimmon tree
you reeling toward
that natural
first
absurdity
with so much wonder still
it shakes your voice

the temporary is the sacred
takes me out

and even the stars and even the snow and even
the rain
do not amount to much unless these things submit to some disturbance
some derangement such
as when I yield myself/belonging
to your unmistaken
body

and let the powerful lock up the canyon/mountain
peaks the
hidden rivers/waterfalls the
deepdown minerals/the coalfields/goldfields
diamond mines close by the whoring ore
hot
at the center of the earth

spinnin


- June Jordan 2002