JUST INSIDE THE DOOR
Jordan, June
JUST INSIDE THE DOOR June Jordan Finding the Way Home On a cold night, more than twenty years ago, Bucky Fuller was explaining why he always wore three watches, simultaneously, on his left wrist....
...We have no excuse...
...Subsequently, of course, I realized Fuller had been completely serious...
...But tonight I am exhausted by routine danger and the price-tag attached to my single lifestyle...
...Because I had been living in nearby Brooklyn for most of my life, and also because, by then, I had sipped my way through more than one glass of wine, I readily accepted the first assertion, but I balked at the second...
...And so, following the average AmeriJune Jordan, poet, essayist, and playwright, is the director of the creative-writing program at the State University of New York at Stonybrook...
...I want safety that I do not have to purchase at the expense of a healthy personal life...
...In the meantime, in my wondering, wandering heart, in my fearful and hungry state of acute disequilibrium, I am homeless...
...I want that safety...
...Who would accept military proscription of the funeral services for any member of our family...
...In the meantime, on the eve of Yasir Arafat's courageous "We want peace...
...We want to live in our Palestinian state, and let live" statement in Geneva, the Israeli government "confined" 650,000 Palestinians to their "homes" and cut off the electricity...
...And so, no matter where and when I move again, I will be working with everything I've got to change the apparent answer that obtains today...
...I am choosing between climates, predictable colors of the sky, racial and ethnic mixtures among possible colleagues or neighbors, artistic or intellectual communities in place, available political camaraderie, and the financial and physical costs of housing in relationship to work...
...But I am overloaded with privilege...
...See the Editor's Memo on Page 4.) can clock to the minute, I think I will probably move somewhere new by the middle of 1989...
...I refuse coexistence with the unspeakable indictment of that fact...
...We are committed to peace...
...But, mostly, I am seeking an escape from answering-machine ellipses and the need to take an exorbitant taxi before you can sit beside a lover or a friend...
...The bottom-line translation of child abuse means that Lisa Steinberg lived and died homeless in America...
...This is my short list: For 1989 I dedicate myself to the memory of Lisa Steinberg and to the future of the Palestinian people...
...In fact, nowadays, it happens faster than that: Every three years, "all of America" moves out of town...
...my mind could not assimilate any information more subtle than the difference between a man and a sycamore...
...We are neither ignorant nor fundamentally inert, except, of course, by choice...
...To this end, I will be searching for relevant comrades and group initiatives to support...
...I want a surrounding of lovers and friends...
...Having settled my own intimate objectives for the new year, it is not difficult to identify related political issues that I must engage...
...You can cut and run or fly and stop and land in a happier spot than the one that you now occupy...
...Or how about a television series showing cops and teachers and other kids from down the hall and rabbis and social workers and rock stars and poets and doctors and lawyers and mayors and governors berserk with outrage and speeding with determination and setting up benefits and tearing down doors and holding a solitary beaten child very very close to their hearts...
...We want peace...
...We are committed to peace...
...Two-and-a-half years ago, I forever abandoned the homogeneous, street-deserted, house-bound, heterosexist desperation of the Long Island suburbs and returned to my beloved Brooklyn where, I knew, my eyes and ears would never be lonely for diversified, loud craziness and surprise...
...She could neither invent nor discover her own safety, her own benign environment...
...Six-year-old Lisa really is dead...
...I refuse coexistence with the unspeakable indictment of that fact...
...She did not...
...Did anyone ever show her an old-fashioned storybook of fireside evenings on the hearth with Mom and Dad and Brother and Sleeping Dog practically comatose with tender contentment...
...There was nowhere for her to go...
...I am looking for a better place to live...
...Where is the evidence of horror and moral and political mobilization when any single Palestinian is shot and killed "by accident," or otherwise...
...I am no longer amused by the six-block walk between the garage where I must park my car and the building where I must climb three flights of (carpeted) stairs before I can enter my own living room...
...As this new year begins, I find myself inside that privileged mainstream of nomadic Americans...
...Who among us would accommodate to an absence of civil liberties or no control over the light switch in our house...
...And whatever it takes, telegrams to legislators/hammer and nails/bodily intervention/money through the mail/regular bouts of "babysitting" at-large or, yes, adoption, per se, I am resolved to save at least one child from the violence of our insanity and neglect...
...As Bucky said, "Man is not a tree...
...But where is the outcry against the murder of more than 300 Palestinians subjected to the fatal caprice of military occupation...
...Man is not a tree," he told me, and, "All of America moves out of town every five years...
...The bottom line for six million Palestinian men, women, and children is that they are living and they are dying, homeless, in full view of the whole world...
...There was no one worthy of her inevitable trust...
...I believe that the issue of a home for Lisa Steinberg and the issue of a home for the Palestinian people is one and the same: The question is whether non-Europeans, and whether children, everywhere, possess a human right to sanctuary on this planet...
...I am trying to find my way home...
...I am wracked by real-life options that transmit the same amazing message: You can choose where you will live...
...Did she ever see that...
...I remember two things that he said...
Vol. 53 • February 1989 • No. 2
