IT’S ONLY A QUEEN-SIZED BED
It’s only a queen-sized bed and I’m sleeping on the right-hand ledge because you broke your wrist when you fell with your arm outstretched on the concrete skirt of our neighbor’s pool and it rests in a splint on a pile of pillows with Felix the cat between our legs and I can never tell whether he’s sleeping above or below the blankets. As usual, I’m half-awake thinking of Proust and Bolaño, how detailed time passes slowly at the dinner table of the first and in the science fiction of the second. I met Bolaño through his books because he seems to be a brain surgeon of a certain type. On a fine day in Spring, when I was reading In the Spirit of Science Fiction, his earliest book about poets, that is to say almost any of his books, I ran across his description of an epidemic of compulsive woodworking break out in an African village. He reports how all of the woodworkers unexpectedly die as if their hobby had incited a virus of violence and this made me think of Bolaño’s literary opposite, how Proust doesn’t make predictions about the future but wrote about the lived past, how it takes me the same amount of time to read about a dinner in his novel as it took the real Marcel to attend the actual event. There’s no real sense of time passing in Bolaño and no idea of who is speaking. In Science Fiction the personal letters ascribed to Jan, a main character in the book, go undated and I’ve never heard of any of his poets, real or imagined, however I do like the idea of how they proudly set a Mexican record of sorts for the greatest number of hardscrabble poetry magazines published in any given month or year. Bolaño’s fictional poets live in poverty like most poets do who don’t have academic teaching positions but not a single example of their poems is quoted. A few pages on, Jan tells a Marcel-type Narrator about a young writer who reportedly ate a good portion of Remembrance of Things Past while trying to stave off starvation during the siege of Sevastopol in 1942. At that moment I felt as if Bolaño had read my mind with his own unreality since someone somewhere has probably made a literal meal of Proust. The two writers are like a hall of mirrors in which pleasure arrives with a headache. Proust really loved that “little yellow patch of wall” in Vermeer’s View of Delft, which can’t be found in the actual painting though Proust invents such an odor of reality that his View of Delft occupies my head wearing the patch. Being quarantined during Covid at home seemed like a good time to write a poem about Bolaño in which time explodes into nothing and the compulsive woodworkers in the Congo are long gone, many bronze statues of King Leopold having been melted down. Like other previous efforts of mine, a Bolaño poem turned me toward Proust instead.
~
JERSEY GIRLS
What do you want to know and what can I tell you?
You could marry either one and be done with it—
flat consonants and broken vowels gone with time.
Tonight’s the first date in a year or two both sisters sit
across from me at Liz’s Café on Bradford Street
the younger by twenty-four months tall and thin
with a face out of Modigliani, the older one shorter
by a head bright as a Russian doll Picasso stacked.
They have beaten with charm every clock but the one
we will all lose to including tonight’s menu held
by a gay hand having landed in the provident world
of Provincetown and the nearby infant at the next table
who can’t read this text. Long ago the Jersey girls
turned their backs to the consonants of the highway
they were born to before hunting down the men
who would share their beds for a lifetime helplessly
caught by beauty and sense. Like tourists they rode
the dunes in morning buggies and watched for whales
in the afternoon. You could feel their energy in the jokes
they told bleeding the air away in giant balloons Adam
painted over the years and whatever the writer wrote.
You could never tell what the girls were laughing about
in their seventh decade by sharing childhood secrets
back and forth at this table decorated with the broth
of three generations, the eldest of irreplaceable sense
and beauty must be filmed before no one remembers
the last Hollywood stars they fed on like sharks
blowing kisses with aerated hair and lips painted red.
~
TIME & PLACE
You can’t go back
You’ve changed and the place has changed
The iodine smell of the ocean
And the vanilla of your ice cream
Have gone with age
And the boardwalk of youth.
Perhaps no one knew how it happened
Not one of the loves that has touched you
Or made you
Could warn you
Not when they were here to tuck you in
Not one could imagine the change
In themselves
While reading fairy tales in Little Golden Books
Or dropping the needle on a long-playing record.
Not as they drove their two-toned Bel Air
Where you sat without a safety belt
In white and aquamarine
And the carousel on Coney Island
Seemed just ahead
As the sun began to set.
They didn’t know how the end was another time
So near, so final.
~
TO YOU WHO ARE STILL MARRIED
I’ve done it and I don’t know how—
perhaps you can tell me what I missed
doing it by habit or instinct.
Fifty years have passed without reason
the two of us barely compatible
in ways big and small.
We started as a pair of green vegetables
put in a freezer at peak season.
Of late we wrinkle at the same rate
though I will never see it in her face,
the refractive index of my eyes changing
fast enough to stop time.
Perhaps we’re twins who speak in stereo
faster than either one can breathe,
powered by opinions on everything.
I guess we shared a love for enormity,
of space and art, of natural adventure,
of the brain at rest in the heart forever.
~
ENTRE NOUS
Forty years have passed after only one of us had felt
the proscenium of life between your legs
that British nous for a common sense we couldn’t share
that secret knowledge of practical intelligence
and pain, even in confidence, the philosophy of mind
and intellect only a woman can bear
if time has slowed so you could touch the nearest star.
A street away I closed a patient’s head
before rushing to your side and some ordinary hours
you suffered in sweat but can’t remember
how you were dressed or why your injection failed.
Wheeling you into Delivery with haste
I saw a doctor use a glove he’d dropped to the floor.
Entre nous, love and a boy and energy enough to rest.
~
MICHAEL SALCMAN: former chairman of neurosurgery, University of Maryland and president of The Contemporary Museum, a child of the Holocaust and a survivor of polio. Poems in Barrow Street, Blue Unicorn, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, Notre Dame Review, Raritan and Smartish Pace. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti (nominated for The Poets’ Prize), The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, classic and contemporary poems on medicine, A Prague Spring (Sinclair Poetry Prize winner), Shades & Graces (winner Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize), Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (2022) and Crossing the Tape (2024).