Berkeley in the Nineties
By Tess Taylor
again for C. & J.
Too late for hippie heyday
& too young to be yuppies
we wandered creeksides & used bookstores.
There were still so many movie theaters.
Our parents marched against the many wars
& fed us carob chips. We foraged
in free boxes for old wrap skirts
but had absorbed consumerist desire,
& also longed for new J. Crew.
There was no internet yet & so we listened
to Steve Miller Band on repeat
& cut geometry to skinny dip
in the Essex Street hot tub.
We knew the code, just as we knew
to disapprove of America.
We walked out of high school
after Rodney King. We helped our mothers
shop for bulk oats at the Co-op.
We felt we could & couldn't
solve it. We could say systemic racism
but couldn't name yet how our lives were implicated.
We drove our grandmothers' Volvos up Marin
& watched the spangled world
from Grizzly Peak. We climbed Mount Diablo
in spring rain. We learned
the meaning of the word hegemony
but thought the word itself was hegemonic.
We got high to the patter of the windchimes.
When we missed our friends
we wandered to the farmers market
for bruised peaches. Bruised peaches were
our kind of revolution. There was not internet yet & so
we made elaborate cutout flyers to invite
our friends to picnics up at Codornices.
Bodies in space were revolution.
Some of us were feminist & queer.
Some of us wore wool sailor pants
& passed out at bad university parties.
Oh my god, that was embarrassing.
Some of us cut class to spend
days reading in the dank public library.
Alone in our aloneness we fumbled
with one another's bodies
in dim alleyways near City Lights.
Our revolution: under cherry blossoms,
reading Virgil. One of us made red
mushroomy kombucha. One of us
taught the others to eat burdock.
The burdock eating didn't really take.
Some days we paid the toll
for people behind us
on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge.
At Steep Ravine howled Whiteman at the sea.
Most days, we were a crumbling outpost. Nearby
the street preacher, Paul of the Pillar,
spoke in helter-skelter baritones from
liberated air on the Cal campus.
We too believed in liberated air & some nights
bought Paul sausages at Top Dog.
Under the Campanile, we discussed
how Ginsburg was a sellout now because he posed
for Gap ads in wide-legged chinos.
Chinos were not the revolution.
Trigonometry was not the revolution.
We memorized short poems by D. H. Lawrence.
We were quick fish who read
Gary Snyder in someone's dad's Mendocino cabin.
Some of us climbed ferny gullies
on winter solstice & got topless.
Decorated each other in white reindeer lichen.
Recited the Tao Te Ching. Had sex on a cliff.
Reindeer lichen was the revolution.
We craved transcendental revelations,
the radical & burning future:
We lobbied for condoms in the high school bathrooms
even though the bathrooms needed toilet paper—
Copyright Credit: Tess Taylor, "Berkeley in the Nineties" from Rift Zone. Copyright © 2020 by Tess Taylor. Reprinted by permission of Red Hen Press.
Source: Rift Zone (Red Hen Press, 2020)