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.