Convergence of the Dead
—Hoffman, Lux, Allen, Wilbur & Hall
Though these revenants may arrive any time they wish
all must come to my overcrowded meeting place—
fortunate to miss the pandemic,
the recession and the riots, all of which supplanted
(but not for me)—the sorrow of their passing.
They come in the chronos of their leaving,
heroes and friends, and proponents of good living
gentle lives of fierce loving and kind witness.
Hoffman is the first; I can hear the crepitation in his lungs
moist with salt water from constant weeping for his wife
and behind him the spectral tribes immortalized in his verse.
Look who’s come, Dan exclaims topping a bourbon for Tom
with a maraschino cherry, his favorite taste.
An image of veined arms and flowing hair fills my mind,
his warm voice and smiling charm outlive the cells
that killed him too soon. Dick arrives at cocktail time,
his Buddhist heart having crashed on Christmas day.
He bears sweet lyrics gathered from small-town signs
and folk songs heard on cross-country summer jaunts
made in Lori’s ancient Honda. I am set to wonder if
Allen’s angel shares his fear of flying?
Near the party’s end we all get up in greeting Wilbur
as he enters the room reciting a few of his perfect rhymes
in meter. All this toasting and talking tests my sense
of reality—but Don Hall’s presence off in a corner
reassures me, he’s taking notes.
Moreover, the last and oldest New Englanders,
Hall and Wilbur look pretty good for making it to eternity.
During the plague I didn’t dare tell them Fenway Park
had closed but I suspect Tom Lux (as usual) already knows.
.
Hard-Boiled Dicks
…………………….—after Laura, 1944
Before we go out my wife laughs a little when she hears me mumble hard-boiled dicks thinking I’m thinking something dirty, like women did before the automobile, the pill and the freedom to do anyone at any time as if what had been good enough for men was just as good for them—STDs, loss of innocence, loss of pride, not waiting for that great first love in a dream of perpetual loyalty to the future. Me, I’m dreaming all the way back to the Forties and Fifties, speaking of film, and dames and gats, of a black and white celluloid world filled with shame and disgust. At this point I’m practicing my hardest Brooklyn stare while looking in the mirror and straightening my tie when I catch sight of a pimple at the side of my nose, a tense lump of pain smaller than a pill. Suddenly I’m ready to crumple from medical student’s disease, afraid to squeeze lest it cause much later, an abscess in my brain’s frontal lobe, almost the first thing I learned not to do in medical school and the last I hope to forget. Oh yes, lesson two back then was to stay out of the sun—nothing worse than melanoma, especially if you live at night like Dracula or I do and you must keep your skin pale and safe, like Bogey & Bacall’s or Dana Andrews in that celluloid dream I’ve entered, that hard-boiled dick who mooned over a woman he’d never met, listening to the music play while looking at Laura’s face. Now we’ve both gotten ready and my tie is straight; I hold my hands up like a camera, sighting my wife as she steps into the space my fingers make.
© Michael Salcman
Michael Salcman is a 76-year-old retired physician and teacher of art history. He was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. He is a child of the Holocaust and a survivor of polio. His poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, The Café Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, Raritan, and Smartish Pace. His books include The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises), nominated for The Poets Prize; The Enemy of Good Is Better; Poetry in Medicine, a widely used anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness and healing (Persea Books, 2015); A Prague Spring, Before & After (winner 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize); and Shades & Graces, the inaugural winner of the Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020). His fifth collection, Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems was published last year (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022).
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