PIANO MAN

Friday night. Beautiful jazz piano at Picante’s. Two people in
the room. Three grubby skateboarders and several ticket
holders waiting for their food in the next. The music, simple,
yet impossibly lovely, impossibly complicated, pours out of
the shiny black spinet. The piano player notices me listening.
He can hear me listening. He turns his head slightly to look.
I look away to avoid eye contact because the music is
impossibly intimate. How can I tell him that it’s okay that no
one but me hears? That I will walk out and down Sixth Street
and he will be alone but that he must not stop playing? That
he is not alone as long as he sounds? That he means as long as
he sounds? That he cannot stop playing. He must not.

-Joyce Jenkins

Berkeley’s poetry Walk was laid in October 2003 along Edison Street between Shattuck and Milvia Streets. The route includes 128 metal plates with excerpts from songs, each of which is related in one way or another to the city of Berkeley.

The current sign features a poem by the American poet Joyce Jenkins. Publisher and editor of Poetry Flash, Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award winner.