Jan Steckel's Blog: Horizontal Poet Sings Bidyke Blues - Posts Tagged "albany-bulb"

The Albany Bulb is a spit of land north of Berkeley, California. It used to be a dump. Now it's a seaside dog park, an overgrown new wilderness, and an outdoor guerilla art gallery. -- Jan


Lighting Up the Albany Bulb

I smell it before I see it: fennel taller than we are.
Sea-salt air, and a breath of methane.
Dangling from a tree, a doll’s head,
and a black boot spray-painted orange
bearing the neatly written legend
“Not a skinhead anymore.”

A tumbledown crazy heap of giant children’s
concrete play blocks.
A castle on the bay
with a winding staircase to the roof,
where a plaque reads
“You have a heart of gold,
now live up to it.”

Pampas grass between the rebar,
coyote brush, blackberries, gulls and geese.
Porcelain doll arms wash up
in a trail like the crest of foam
or the wreckage of seaweed and driftwood
marking the high tide line.
Six-foot-long perch
grown monster-sized on industrial chemicals
blow bubbles in the surf.

At night, when the moon lights up the Bulb,
sitting men of Styrofoam pontoons,
standing men of rusting industrial junk,
a steel man riding an iron dragon,
a mermaid painted on a concrete tube,
an earthen woman in a sky-colored dress
reaching her hands to heaven,
all come alive like Golems.
They arise creaking and flaking,
swim, stride and fly across the water to the Richmond Costco
step on the roof, walk through the windows,
examine the merchandise.
They bring armfuls of lawn chairs and coolers
home to the Bulb
to fashion mates for themselves.

They couple madly to the barks of ghostly greyhounds
from the Albany track. Before the night is out,
they produce rusty babies
of old wire hangers and packing peanuts.

Later, when the icecaps melt,
and the Bulb is submerged again,
the giant perch still convene there,
among the painted concrete blocks.
They let their babies swim through the mermaid tube.
The big ones whisper in watery fish-language,
“Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair.”

Jan Steckel, 2007

First appeared in in San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly, No. 36, November 2007