June 2015
I am sitting in Baltimore, slowly withdrawing from my life as a neurosurgeon and spending more and more time on the history of modern and contemporary art as well as my poetry, written and published since the 1970s. I spent ten happy years attending the Summer Writers Seminars at Sarah Lawrence where I came under the influence of Tom Lux and Dick Allen. My wife and I are Chesapeake Bay sailors, the time for which is contracting due to age and two, soon to be three, grandchildren in San Francisco. My books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good Is Better ( both from Orchises) and Poetry in Medicine, my recently published anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors and diseases (Persea Books, 2015).
A Perfect Gift
When the plastic ball falls into the aortic socket
there’s work to do on the mitral valve, the old skin
shaved out and the new, leaves cut from a pig
settled in with a stitch or two, making a circuit
with its mechanical neighbor. Generous oxygen
flows through in a whoosh as once it did in the pig
who, rutting in slop and ordure, fashions to fit
a perfect gift, not of bone or brain or larded gristle,
but a muscled valve like our own. His simple heart
uncomplaining wears effort like a wimple or crown
and gates unexamined life in alternating beats
of silence and sound…until porcine nature mates
with a lion-hearted hunger to go on and on.
The Game
There’s a lot of empty air in the game—
moments the announcers fill up
with chat and promotion and footnotes
of historical data between pitches
and steps off the mound, the batter’s box
emptied of all but anticipation,
the batter rubbing out the entangling lines
at his feet, the umpire adjusting his mask,
the catcher once more assuming the crouch
that would grind your legs into your hips.
And the outfielder fiddling with the sun,
blocking it with a hand, then flipping his glasses
down to rest on black painted cheeks.
And the momentary action of a thwack
that stops in the air as he circles it like a dog
and the debate that happens next
when the ball, missed by his glove kisses the top
of the wall, seen from uncountable angles
by heads twisted back from seats on the foul line
in right and eyes craning forwards from left
and by deer-in-the-headlights stares at the pole
from folks sitting in center. Is it out and fair?
And behind home plate from where I sit
it’s hopeless to assert a truth 300 feet away
even after years of trying, the cheers and groans
filling the air at a brilliant and graceful mistake,
some would revile and others recognize,
sucking in their breath,
the stands filled with a community of strugglers
who wish they could make a mistake like this.
Everything Is As It Was
The small trucks put away,
the Princess nightgown,
the books with Wumps and talking trains.
The house with a broken heart
neither creaks nor spills; once again
the cat goes room to room unafraid.
No one jumps on a bed, no one laughs or cries
at the broken bits of matzos everywhere.
Bubbe and Grandpa are safe enough:
The little voices are riding on a plane,
and everything is as it was
and nothing’s the same.
When the plastic ball falls into the aortic socket
there’s work to do on the mitral valve, the old skin
shaved out and the new, leaves cut from a pig
settled in with a stitch or two, making a circuit
with its mechanical neighbor. Generous oxygen
flows through in a whoosh as once it did in the pig
who, rutting in slop and ordure, fashions to fit
a perfect gift, not of bone or brain or larded gristle,
but a muscled valve like our own. His simple heart
uncomplaining wears effort like a wimple or crown
and gates unexamined life in alternating beats
of silence and sound…until porcine nature mates
with a lion-hearted hunger to go on and on.
The Game
There’s a lot of empty air in the game—
moments the announcers fill up
with chat and promotion and footnotes
of historical data between pitches
and steps off the mound, the batter’s box
emptied of all but anticipation,
the batter rubbing out the entangling lines
at his feet, the umpire adjusting his mask,
the catcher once more assuming the crouch
that would grind your legs into your hips.
And the outfielder fiddling with the sun,
blocking it with a hand, then flipping his glasses
down to rest on black painted cheeks.
And the momentary action of a thwack
that stops in the air as he circles it like a dog
and the debate that happens next
when the ball, missed by his glove kisses the top
of the wall, seen from uncountable angles
by heads twisted back from seats on the foul line
in right and eyes craning forwards from left
and by deer-in-the-headlights stares at the pole
from folks sitting in center. Is it out and fair?
And behind home plate from where I sit
it’s hopeless to assert a truth 300 feet away
even after years of trying, the cheers and groans
filling the air at a brilliant and graceful mistake,
some would revile and others recognize,
sucking in their breath,
the stands filled with a community of strugglers
who wish they could make a mistake like this.
Everything Is As It Was
The small trucks put away,
the Princess nightgown,
the books with Wumps and talking trains.
The house with a broken heart
neither creaks nor spills; once again
the cat goes room to room unafraid.
No one jumps on a bed, no one laughs or cries
at the broken bits of matzos everywhere.
Bubbe and Grandpa are safe enough:
The little voices are riding on a plane,
and everything is as it was
and nothing’s the same.
©2015 Michael Salcman