What does this poem mean?

Question

Thinking About Pound on Shattuck Avenue
by Tom Clark

Thinking about Pound on Shattuck Avenue
is like genuflecting in hiking boots a
classic case of being over equipped.
If we live in a sea of insincerity, and they say, how many additional drops
does it take to make a wave?
Forlorn as driftwood, The ABC of Reading- sits untouched, swamped by enough Chez Panisse to give Neptune a heartburn.

At the brink of the frankly autobiographical one hesitates.
Can one live with grace in such a place? Is escape possible?
Were my thoughts of the day
So what else is new… A clerk looked my way.

Art in our time is a toy of the middle class, I said, squirming in my bike pants in the pasta maker bookshop. Gourmets fidgeted all around me, eyes glued to the pages of the Rilke cookbooks. Under the effete weight the hardwood floors contracted. Death came very near. It is really all around us, a pang of dissonance hidden in the surreptitious music of the cash register, in the timid squeak of earth shoes, behind the piped Sibelius- pitched
2 years ago

pitched much too low for dogs to hear, the melody of the death of culture. Th epoets are dead. Ezra floated home on a boat of flowers just in time.

Answer 1

While frequenting eateries along Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, California, the poet is contemplating the meaning of life and death. Or meaninglessness in poet's mind. I'm stretching..... a guess

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