Jan Steckel's Blog: Horizontal Poet Sings Bidyke Blues - Posts Tagged "poem"
Diamonds and Rubies
Diamonds and Rubies
Los Angeles, 1960.
Agapanthus and jacaranda.
Sam Raskin met Max Rosby
at their granddaughter’s garden wedding.
They sat on folding wooden chairs
in their best old suits.
Sam’s pants were a little tight in the belly,
and Max’s jacket a little loose in the shoulders.
Sam told Max
he’d changed his name
from Rassin to Raskin
when he got tired of being called
“Russian” and “Raisin.”
Max told Sam
“Rosby” worked out better for him in retail
than “Rosba.”
Sam knew of some Rosbas in Latvia.
As a boy, he told Max,
he once floated down the river
with his father and the logs
from Byelorus all the way
to the Riga lumber mill
owned by the Rosba family.
The lady of the great house
offered him a glass of water.
He stood at the doorway,
not coming in with his muddy feet,
peering inside at a home grander
than any he had ever seen.
Heavy oak and mahogany chests.
Dark red velvet runners on the stairs.
Leather-bound books in shelves up to the ceilings.
A chandelier dripping diamonds large as chestnuts.
The lady wore black satin,
and when she bent to hand him the glass,
he saw hung around her neck
a heart all of rubies.
Max looked down
at his legs stretched long
on the manicured grass.
His still-broad shoulders
sloped in his jacket.
“That was my mother,”
he said softly.
“She wore a garnet heart
that came from Prague.
The chandelier was crystal.”
“Well,” smiled Sam, shrugging,
hitching up his waistband a little.
“It’ll always be diamonds
and rubies
to me.”
Jan Steckel, 2005
First appeared in the online journal New Works Review, April-June, 2006
Los Angeles, 1960.
Agapanthus and jacaranda.
Sam Raskin met Max Rosby
at their granddaughter’s garden wedding.
They sat on folding wooden chairs
in their best old suits.
Sam’s pants were a little tight in the belly,
and Max’s jacket a little loose in the shoulders.
Sam told Max
he’d changed his name
from Rassin to Raskin
when he got tired of being called
“Russian” and “Raisin.”
Max told Sam
“Rosby” worked out better for him in retail
than “Rosba.”
Sam knew of some Rosbas in Latvia.
As a boy, he told Max,
he once floated down the river
with his father and the logs
from Byelorus all the way
to the Riga lumber mill
owned by the Rosba family.
The lady of the great house
offered him a glass of water.
He stood at the doorway,
not coming in with his muddy feet,
peering inside at a home grander
than any he had ever seen.
Heavy oak and mahogany chests.
Dark red velvet runners on the stairs.
Leather-bound books in shelves up to the ceilings.
A chandelier dripping diamonds large as chestnuts.
The lady wore black satin,
and when she bent to hand him the glass,
he saw hung around her neck
a heart all of rubies.
Max looked down
at his legs stretched long
on the manicured grass.
His still-broad shoulders
sloped in his jacket.
“That was my mother,”
he said softly.
“She wore a garnet heart
that came from Prague.
The chandelier was crystal.”
“Well,” smiled Sam, shrugging,
hitching up his waistband a little.
“It’ll always be diamonds
and rubies
to me.”
Jan Steckel, 2005
First appeared in the online journal New Works Review, April-June, 2006
Alameda in the Shutter-Click
Alameda in the Shutter-Click
From Ballena Bay to Crab Cove, pilings, tide lines,
orange-eyed night heron, cluster of sandpipers.
Every picture laid with transparency over
an older island, when the naval base boomed, or earlier,
when beaches swarmed like Coney Island or Roman baths.
Sepia-toned beribboned hats, ankle-length skirts for the surf.
1918. 1908. 1905. Long-dead bathing beauties balance,
boating and swimming. Neptune Beach, Surf Beach Park,
Sunny Cove Baths, Terrace Bath. New-built Painted Ladies
stand house-proud. Nineteenth century: Tall ships
at Grand Street’s foot, masts poking out of the palimpsest.
Just like place-names, pure sound now, hide Spanish meanings:
“Tree-lined Avenue.” “Bay of the Whales.” Surely it’s more
than poppies, snapdragons, marinas, sunset over San Francisco.
These names: “Yacht Club,” “Mariners Square,”
“The South Shore Beach and Tennis Club,” conceal
ascending aspirations, wavelet after rising wave of immigrants
lacquering over squalid beginnings. (We’ll be Americans too,
and rich, when we live in such place names as these.)
Duck and hooded merganser, coot and grebe.
Each bird only the part you can see.
How much is underwater, paddling madly,
just to look serene for one snap of the camera?
Do they lie high or low in the water, like tall ships,
barnacled bottoms silently scraping the pier?
From South Shore lagoon to the Alameda Estuary:
gulls descend on mussel-bound rocks, seaweed-sheathed,
just as slippery before tide-tables were printed here.
Species introduced, species extinct. Landscape changes:
landfills, dredging, tunnels. Posey Tube and Webster Tube.
Park Street Bridge and High Street Bridge.
Hello and goodbye: to draw a bridge
or to photograph a drawbridge.
The poet is a camera, click, click, click.
Get shutter speed right, correct focal length,
and what was hazy leaps into the clear.
(Winner of the 2007 Jewel by the Bay Poetry Award. First appeared in the Alameda Sun, Aug. 3, 2007)
From Ballena Bay to Crab Cove, pilings, tide lines,
orange-eyed night heron, cluster of sandpipers.
Every picture laid with transparency over
an older island, when the naval base boomed, or earlier,
when beaches swarmed like Coney Island or Roman baths.
Sepia-toned beribboned hats, ankle-length skirts for the surf.
1918. 1908. 1905. Long-dead bathing beauties balance,
boating and swimming. Neptune Beach, Surf Beach Park,
Sunny Cove Baths, Terrace Bath. New-built Painted Ladies
stand house-proud. Nineteenth century: Tall ships
at Grand Street’s foot, masts poking out of the palimpsest.
Just like place-names, pure sound now, hide Spanish meanings:
“Tree-lined Avenue.” “Bay of the Whales.” Surely it’s more
than poppies, snapdragons, marinas, sunset over San Francisco.
These names: “Yacht Club,” “Mariners Square,”
“The South Shore Beach and Tennis Club,” conceal
ascending aspirations, wavelet after rising wave of immigrants
lacquering over squalid beginnings. (We’ll be Americans too,
and rich, when we live in such place names as these.)
Duck and hooded merganser, coot and grebe.
Each bird only the part you can see.
How much is underwater, paddling madly,
just to look serene for one snap of the camera?
Do they lie high or low in the water, like tall ships,
barnacled bottoms silently scraping the pier?
From South Shore lagoon to the Alameda Estuary:
gulls descend on mussel-bound rocks, seaweed-sheathed,
just as slippery before tide-tables were printed here.
Species introduced, species extinct. Landscape changes:
landfills, dredging, tunnels. Posey Tube and Webster Tube.
Park Street Bridge and High Street Bridge.
Hello and goodbye: to draw a bridge
or to photograph a drawbridge.
The poet is a camera, click, click, click.
Get shutter speed right, correct focal length,
and what was hazy leaps into the clear.
(Winner of the 2007 Jewel by the Bay Poetry Award. First appeared in the Alameda Sun, Aug. 3, 2007)
Lighting Up the 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
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
"The Canary Islands Go to the Dogs"
My poem "The Canary Islands Go to the Dogs," about the seven Canary Islands off the coast of Spain, is one of six finalists in this month's Goodreads Newsletter Poetry Contest. If you like poetry, please go to http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/4...
and vote for the poem you like the best!
and vote for the poem you like the best!
Horizontal Poet Sings Bidyke Blues
Bidyke writer and disabled former pediatrician Jan Steckel writes about poetry, fiction, sexuality, doctoring, poverty, and what it feels like to remember what kind of socks everyone at her readings w
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