 I was asked to talk about my long relationship with Janice, so I wrote this and have practiced it so I hopefully can get through it without too much emotion. The first time I heard Janice Reader poetry was the weekend before I started graduate school at UC Berkeley in 1985. I had been driving cab all over the Bay Area that summer and was ready to shift gears and enter the halls of academia. I was terrified to learn about literary theory and criticism, but also a little puffed up with an overblown sense of myself. A writer published in a few literary anthologies and mags, a former regional coordinator of the California Poets in the Schools program, an avid reader of poetry. When I learned that there was a graduate students reading and reception in Duenelle Hall the weekend before classes started, of course I went. Curious to hear from what I consider to be the competition. Janice read from a sheaf of poems that would later form her first book beneath my heart. I remember waiting for a miracle about her mother's inability to accept her as a lesbian and various imagistic poems evoking the familiar landscape of the West Coast and poetic narratives about her tribal history, family heritage, and childhood school years in Berkeley. The reading was a late afternoon event with wine and cheese so people were gathered in convivial clusters talking to each other while a few of them each took a turn at the podium to read. When Janice announced the title The Woman I Love Most, the room quieted a little. She read about wanting to undress the woman I love most, moving down her skin at a snail's pace, leaving a trail of silver brave as a moon. But after a pause her neck stands a move from desire to furious despair concluding, if the woman I love most does not love me, if a kiss falls from her mouth like a moth from a tree, I will trap wild birds, set their wings on fire, and watch them burn until the last soft call flares away. For those of you who've never met Janice, which most of you have so you know what I'm going to say next, she was not the persona of those darker images. She had the tenderest heart, she stepped over ant hills on trails, skirted around spider webs and gardens, and could be heard to whisper, say your prayers little buzz before slapping or waving away a flea or mosquito. She loved all creatures and more than once during our shared life, I was convinced we would die together or at least suffer windshield concussions after she break suddenly to avoid hitting a bird flying too low across the highway or a squirrel skittering over a neighborhood street. I soon understood she was capable of riding with an intensity of emotion because of the deep empathy she acquired from witnessing, listening to, and absorbing the experiences of others. And that same absorption led to her riding in ferocious defensive injustices against people, wildlife, and the earth we all inhabit. I learned a lot from Janice and our 34 years together, the names of birds, flowers, and trees, the intricacies and intimate connections between romance languages, musical tempos, photographers and artist models, and the physical practice of Aikido, the art of peace. I fell deeply in love with her and all the songs we journeyed to and live, and memorized her favorite songs which we sang or listened to on road trips we took to visit our families. Even now, listening to different musical styles conjures up the shoulder sway of a winding mountain pass or flamenco claps of a cattle guard or the vibrato ripple of stair step lines in distant sand dunes. I was often enlightened by her perspectives. One comes to mind from months ago after she no longer wanted me to read aloud to her but still tried to stay up as late as she could to stave off the tumor fevers and night sweats that would disturb her sleep. We had rewatched a few of our favorite PBS series and had found DVDs at the library to binge watch together cuddled on the couch with our cap between us making comments throughout about the plot or character. One show featured a privileged young white lawyer and a street savvy East Indian woman who worked for the firm as an investigator. Having seen the series once already, I made a comment about how unlikely it was for these two to become lovers and Janice said, yes, but they just gave us a sociolinguistic foreshadowing in the repartee we just heard. I was tempted to stop and rewind so I could hear the dialogue again but I also knew she was right. So we kept watching and later I fell asleep thinking, this is one of the many things I will miss about my dearest friend, my gentle mentor, my loving companion, her sharp wit, her wide range of intelligence and her spontaneous observations. In Janice's second book, Earthquake Weather, she wrote a poem that she dedicated for joy. We could take that at face value thinking of the sheer pleasure and delight of being alive but she intended it for our friend, Joy Harjo, who has recently been called to serve as the U.S. poet laureate. I want to read it now to help conjure something from Janice to all of us in this room as we navigate life's joys, sorrows and exquisite beauty, this energy in which we exist. Somehow it is true, this energy in which we exist like the force of music that streams into and out of our hearts. The music itself clenching, releasing, converting one thing into another, anger into hatred, hatred into blood, blood into love. And none of this easy to explain, none of this possible in isolation, though in isolation it happens too. Because we are shaped by a harmony that is at once terrible and wonderful, ascent and dissonant, one moment a masked deity, the next a water monster swimming the crest of a wave, one moment we are smoke, the next fire, now a war, an infant, a hand, a kiss, breath, bird or sunlight. We are something that comes from nothing, nothing from something. Who knows how long we hoped, each of us, to enter this world. So much potential waiting to be fulfilled. Magic is at the center of things. I was a rabbit curled at the bottom of a silk hat. Then something seized me, lifting me from this envelope. I sloughed off the skin of that other life. Now I see how we must decide, how we must make a choice. We think we are limited, but forms are tricky things. At the level where hearts dissolve, maps have no meaning. Anguish and love drive us ceaselessly from one existence to the next. I'll leave you with a shorter poem from Janice's chapbook, The Force of Gratitude. It calls forth her ability to capture moments both lucid and visionary. One star. One star gleams above the dark edge of the mountains. One star or one planet, bright with reflected light. One moon shines down on the valley west of here, floating in hazy clouds. One bird calls from the pinion, only one. And one mountain far south, snow on its flanks, distinct in the dusky glimmer before dawn. I wish I had tobacco and sweetgrass to make an offering to the night, to give myself fully to prayer, to reside in the song of that bird. I want to be without words, without speech, to find my way into a language so fine it becomes nothing but melody.