Berkeley, Friday morning. Cold and grey, not exactly hiking weather, but I went hiking anyway. Not that I wanted to go, but a few days ago I had bought new hiking shoes ($59.99) and felt the nagging responsibility - lest I've wasted my money - to try them on. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that my new hiking shoes wanted to go hiking and, having nothing better to do, I just tagged along. My binoculars wanted to go hiking too, so I had no alternative. Up Derby street, up Claremont Canyon Recreational Area, up the steep trail that cuts through a grove of giant eucalyptus trees with their bark coming down in strips like old wallpaper. In January everything is more or less in a state of disrepair, California included. Even the green of the evergreens has an unpleasant air about it - dank, oversaturated ivy green that poisons the eye. Up the trail, beyond the eucalypti, stands the field of dry coyote brush, a mini-desert of sorts on top of the Berkeley hills. Turkey vultures drift in the air currents above, biding their time, waiting probably for an exhausted hiker to collapse. I kept on walking. Two middle-aged women with their golden retriever passed me by. Then, a panting man with a panting golden retriever, a panting man with a panting black labrador. I guess the dogs wanted to go for a hike and their owners just tagged along.
Except for the transparent view of San Francisco Bay from top of the hills, there isn't much to see. But the view is worth it: the quiet colony of Berkeley houses basking on the shore, the water's far-off sheen somehow airy and rarefied, as if fog. Foggy water. In the distance, the cargo cranes of the Oakland harbor looked like a herd of prehistoric animals quenching their thirst. I kept on walking. Three hours. Then back to my room.

The Anniversary

Out of remission, autumn spreads again
all over America, an ominous rash

mapping the oaks, the feverish apples,
as clusters of gray squirrels go awry

somewhere in the branches like tumors
fattening up on fallen fruit. Autumn

has come: the season of hair loss, weight
loss, loss of appetite, insomnia,

headaches, nausea, the season
of mellow frustrations, and failure

to urinate even when rain keeps on
dripping from the intravenous sky,

unable to ease up pain.
Let’s face it: war will never end

however we bombard our bodies
or the terrorist cells of our enemy –

someone survives in the rubble
and staggers to the safe haven of hate

to wait out the winter and pray
for martyrdom, the blossom of death.

The man in the wheelchair spilled
an alphabet
in front of our feet and then asked
for directions: “Which way
to the step show?”
his grimy index all the while
tracing individual letters, smudged ink,
as we followed his cue, spelling out
like a chorus of first-graders, shy
in the beginning, gradually growing
more confident, excited over
the long-forgotten craft of reading less
than words. “Which way to the step show?”
but we didn’t know, how could we
(grad students in English literature
overfed with language)
point out the right direction to the man
in the wheelchair,
who simply wanted to see
people dance.

Sunflowers in Berkeley

Newly arrived in Berkeley at the end of August,
I commiserate with the local sunflowers
too sunburned and heavy already
to hold their faces up toward the smothering sun,
which they used to call home.

Like a cavalcade
of faithless, road-weary pilgrims
they stare, guilt-ridden, at their feet instead,
trekking an unasked-for journey
while the ripe seeds drop on the ground,
tears that have wholly blackened
their once green eyes.

No, this is neither the time, nor the country
to plant tears: highways stretch across the horizon
and beyond them – the ocean;
burly kids play football, play guitars
on the sun-lit campus lawns;
and I remember that young bearded poet
sitting under the shade of the Southern Pacific locomotive,
fifty years ago at the exact same spot,
mourning similar losses, but hopeful and ecstatic
over his scepter of a sunflower.

I wish I could still believe in California’s
and poetry’s power to lessen pain.

A Toast to Emile Zola

Gathered round the banquet tables of the Berkeley library,
no steward brims our cups with wine, or good ale,
which so many poems praise, and all the literary feasts
of novels vanish the moment we decide
to leaf through the pages with a tongue, literally,
mistaking them for the layers of a good lasagna or
a tuna sandwich mother has placed in a lunchbox.
“This is a sad tavern,” a fellow student whispers my way,
and there’s sorrow, and anger in his eyes,
when the librarian warns him to stop humming
his favorite song and get down to reading whatever
he’s reading, which happens to be a biography of Bach,
or else get out of the library, fast, now.
He closes his book like a piano, like a violin case,
plugs in the earphones of his iPod, and starts singing
his favorite song on the way out, bellowing now,
happy to have done his lessons so quickly,
and I can still hear him outside the open window,
when another student lifts up his water-bottle
high in the air and proposes a toast
to that profligate but prolific writer, Emile Zola.

Time-Farmers

Come spring, they plant cogs by the dozen
in the broken ground, and wind up
patience. Then, just in case,
someone puts up a scarecrow to stand guard
at the edge of the farm
or maybe serve as a sundial with two hands.

Time-farmers. Unsubsidized by the government,
untouched by technology, they use
only the most primitive tools:
a pendulum and an endless string
to sway over the heads of tick-tocking cattle;
instead of grain they stack up hours
in the barn, and later grind them down
to fine seconds, before bread rises in the oven,
just in time for supper.

Such simple life, gathering to spend, until
a drought comes around,
or a flood, and the cogs fail.
Only hunger is left to cuckoo, softly,
like a grandfather’s clock.

Зъбите

Тук, под високите прозорци
на стоматологията,
София се прозява
с разкривените си панелни зъби,
олющения им емайл,
а в далечината проблясват
пломбираните кубета на Александър Невски.

Може би сега свещениците обядват,
дъвчат банички със сирене или пържоли
със сметана
в ресторанта на Семинарията,
докато отвън
просяците са заседнали
като загниващи мръвки между фасадите.

Някъде в Южния парк
езикът заспива
зад беззъбите венци на пеленаче.

Epidermal Macabre
Theodore Roethke

Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes, --
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.