Practical Water

Berkeley Water

B E R K E L E Y WAT E R The farmers’ market is breaking down; fringed sagging canopies fold inward like the Renaissance. Wrestlers & jugglers enter the park; slightly soggy boxes are being flattened as pineapple guavas finally relax & a chill comes over the waist of autumn. From Happy Boy Organic Farms come bottles of thick-as-infinity apple juice with its ankles of pulp. Early tangelos, late plums, Shinko pears cut into tender celadon wedges, mute mache. Women in oversized aprons wash knives in Berkeley tap. Tap. Berkeley tap-tap. The runo‡ joins culverts of the creek & hurries to the Bay. Mists of elemental sense hover over crates of fruit as hybrids cohabitate. Men too smart to pray talk with men too smart not to. Terraces of almonds, piles of ridged hazelnuts & tubs of hot dal. Marjoram, stalks of lavender & limp dill. Chips for sampling tomatillo salsas. You have entered the market with your beloved, your souls like drops of water easily merged. Water tumbles from the east, trickles under the huge blond radishes, dark parsley, big broccoli rabe & mustard greens, beneath only slightly popular bitter melons, baskets of trench-coat gray sunflower seeds, flat & 7 8 curly kale, unruly rainbow chard, under raisiny balsamic vinegar from Sonoma & tables of Big Paw Olive Oil, violet grapes, girls with yo-yos, boys doing Tai Chi, beneath smart, worriedlooking Berkeley babies slumped in very expensive strollers while their mothers eat carob-coated pretzels & their fathers eat floppy artichoke pizza slices. The inside of a dream is itself; the world is ways to have considered it. Down goes Berkeley water under jars of twice-born tan-oak & Sierra wildflower honey, trays of porcini mushrooms, calm shitakis & gold parasol chanterelles from secret locales. Everything that happens is so odd; it enters matter over & over as mystical names. Blue Heron Farms. Phonemes in water join sixteen kinds of Napa tomatoes all glitter & rondure next to nets of persimmons—the big kind that will ripen, the squat kind that can’t. Wings of purple & green cabbages the size of musicians’ heads open next to squashes with spiders pretending to be speckles. Sexy peaceful spinaches will be new next week as will the fennel smelling of licorice, lyric Fujis from Blossom Blu‡ Orchards round as depictions of time in dreams, globes of baby eggplants, pods of cardamom, planets of pocked oranges, chestnuts, & radical fabric hearts of pomegranates covered by motiveless fog— 7 9 ...