DEAD / NOT DEAD
My younger self rises at night making the rounds
of memory in a place called Shock Trauma
where they first started paging me to pronounce the dead—
not an easy task after a youthful head’s been smashed
in an auto accident or a self-inflicted wound like this,
his right temple drilled by a twenty-two.
Our patient no longer wants to stay here I suppose
as if he could ever leave the planet today, kept alive
by a menu of tubes carrying drugs and saving his breath.
In this dream at the bed-side I am bent in prayer,
pinching the skin on every limb, waiting for one to move
but they refuse. I watch myself turning his head
from side to side after squirting water into each ear
hoping his eyes will slide away like marbles in a marionette.
When they don’t move, I wave a penlight in his pupils
without response—a final sign of early death.
It is then I reach for a syringe of Narcan secretly kept
in the back pocket of my blue jeans for injecting the drug
intravenously, a plan beyond yesterday’s medical protocols
now thought to be the ultimate test for awakening
a drugged-out brain—shaking it up against reality
and metaphor, against every law of nature and man.
At the end of my dream he coughs on the tube in his throat
and my team steps back into the silent past,
the wish to pronounce him gone at last.
He is alive but blind from the bullet’s path,
its side-to-side route that overheated both orbital roofs,
and I awake to the present with a pleasant surprise
a poet who wrote death does not exist in poetry.
IN THE SPIRIT OF BALTIMORE
Mere seconds after the collapse
The weight of the bridge forces the bow of the ship
To sit on the bottom of the river
In a pile of steel and silt, where our hearts also sit
The city’s future barely beating
While the commerce of a nation bleeds out the last
Heavyweight containers of cars for Ohio
And threshers for farms as far as Nebraska.
Silence spreads like smoke to the nearby Fort
Once attacked by foreign cannons,
In a threat to our newborn freedom,
And a buoy striped in America’s colors
Marks the spot where a young man stood
On a British frigate composing the national hymn.
In this hour we are not disconnected from each other
Nor can we forget the lives of men lost in muddy water.
Having survived many a war, we won’t run for cover.
*
MICHAEL SALCMAN: poet, physician and art historian, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland. Poems appear in Barrow Street, Blue Unicorn, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, and Smartish Pace. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, his popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on medical subjects, A Prague Spring, Before & After, winner 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize, and Shades & Graces: New Poems, inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Book Prize (2020). Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (2022) and the forthcoming Crossing the Tape (2024) are published by Spuyten Duyvil.
New Critique 