Read More: A brief Q&A with Michael Salcman
The Long Moment
I have kept my ear against the sky
forever and ever
where the radiant past of a distant star
with the faintest signal from another galaxy
seems to say here we are
shake hands with your relatives,
lovers and friends,
and the light of that star will catch you up
with the past when the present evaporates.
Of the future nothing is known
but the past is certain, banked in ledgers
and journals, and shining in our lenses
on mountaintops from light years away.
After the Sun grows cold
the planets of a more distant star
will see us on our return
and hear our voices in their telepathy.
Our past is their future, its music and film
and the thin line of our poetry—Take care.
The Travesties of Aging
I am learning how to walk up and down my stairs again
in PT—down towards Hell with the bad left leg first
up towards Heaven with the good one on the right—
the cane always poised on the same tread as the polio leg,
a synchronicity too complex for my ancient head. […]
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The Torch of Enthusiasm
—i.m. artist Raoul Middleman, 1935-2021
My friend Raoul died last night
who could talk faster than a Bay oyster
sliding down your gullet. […]
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Missing the Superfluous
It’s taken the music out of the air,
the gym out of the muscle,
the drink out of the bar,
and grandchildren out of the state
we live in.
Self-entertainment has died.
An old lady asks on the radio
have you ever tried to play pinochle
six feet apart, a riddle worthy of Pythagoras.
She’s noticed how the blondes
in her retirement home
sport roots as gray as the brunettes,
how everyone’s hair has curled up
like a dry mop.
They’re all waiting for Phase 3
and permission to breathe without a mask.
Too old to save,
the straps have come off my sense of time
and all the clocks have turned to confetti.
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Michael Salcman poet, physician and art historian, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. Poems appear in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Café Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, and Poet Lore. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, a popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness and healing, A Prague Spring, Before & After (2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize), and Shades & Graces, inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (2020). Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (2022) was recently published by Spuyten Duyvil.
“Missing the Superfluous,” “The Long Moment,” “and “The Torch of Enthusiasm” originally appeared in Smartish Pace, SALT, and Ginosko, respectively..