In Berkeley, By Robert Pinsky

Afternoon light like pollen.

This is my language, not the one I learned.

We hungry generations with our question

Of shapes and changes, Did you think we wanted

To be like you?

I flicker and for a second

I’m picking through rubbish

To salvage your half-eaten muffin, one hand

At my ear to finger a rill of scab.

Not native

To California, with olive and silver

Leaves like dusty sickles flashing

In the wind, the eucalyptus bend

And whisper it to the hillsides, Did you think

We wanted to be like you?

The tall flourishers, not what they were.

I sniff one and lift my leg and leave

A signature of piss.

Or the feathery stalks of fennel

Burgeoning in the fissured pavement crazed

And canted by the Hayward Fault.

Outside the mosque or commune they grow chin-high,

Ghostly, smelling of anise

In the profligate sun--

Volunteers, escapees, not what they were.

A tile-domed minaret clad in cedar shingle

Grafted at a corner of the shingle house.

A Sufi mother and child come out, the boy

In mufti, shuffling his sneakers through the duff,

Holding her hand.

Mother.

Her cotton tunic and leggings are white,

And from the tapering pleated cylinder

Of her white vertical headdress

To the shoes white like nurse’s shoes

Except for her hands and pink face

She is a graceful series of white tubes

Like an animated sheet. I wonder if

They shave their heads. Did you think we

Wanted to be like you?

Sister. Once maybe a Debbie or June,

A Jewish sophomore

From Sacramento or a cornsilk daughter

From Fresno or Modesto.

She puts me in the carseat, she fastens my belt.

Conversion. The shaven, the shriven, the circumcised,

The circumscribed--her great-grandmother

Bleeding a chicken, in her matron’s wig

Not what she was.

And Malcolm’s brother

Telling him in visiting hours Don’t eat pork

So that he sat down Saul, and got up Paul.

The demonstrator

At the Campanile in her passion

Shouting at a white-haired professor

As he passed, Old man--why don’t you die?

Forgive me little mother that I will savor

The flesh of pigs. We have forgotten

The Torah and the Koran, on every

Work day and holy day alike

We take up harvesting knives and we sweat

Gathering the herbs of transformation. This

Is my language, not the one I learned.

From “The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996,” by Robert Pinsky (Noonday Press: 320 pp., $15 paper)