CAFFE MEDITERRANEUM

To get to the Med on the dream map of Berkeley
I had to abandon my body of a child and learn
to operate my body of an old man. I had to crawl
through poison oak and coyote-brush dripping with ticks,
on hillside game-paths where I saw the city burning.
In my dream, the café was still there at the center
of the earth, in media terrarium, and the same bearded
regular from forty years ago were still chewing the fat
over the same cappucino in the same corner (biographies
in genetic wreckage of those marble tables, chipped,
kissed, burned and lost and never to be deciphered).
When I hit town, if you were truly hip you still called it
the Piccolo, and when I ran in breathless one afternoon
in Feb. 1969 to break the ageless hush and yell "they’re
using tear gas on campus!" not one head turned to listen,
but I would have to accept birth and let go of death before I
could begin to understand this dispassionate wisdom.
Passionate wisdom? the denizens of the street are fresh out,
and I’m not sure I accept any definition of community
large enough to include me, but you never know where
the heart is until they amputate. Once the Med disappears
I don’t know what fires I will have to crawl through
or what lives I may negotiate to get back there.

-John Oliver Simon

2023
Ariel Rubinstein

Plate from Berkeley Poetry Walk

More details can be found here Click for the item in The ultimate street signs site