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.