First Thing in the Morning
The man with strong hands squeezes his head
From ear to ear until he can feel his face
Disappear except for the nose peering back
At him from the mirror and the honking noise
He makes sneezing into a tissue.
The woman first checks to see if she’s bleeding
A monthly or if she can move her ballerina legs
After cracking his nut hours ago deceiving him
With false cries of pleasure. All these years
What does he know about her physiology
When he has only his? He warms his face
With a towel before shaving barber cream off
A light beard using a two-piece blade and slaps
Mentholated alcohol on pink cheeks and chin
Looking a lot like a baby pig made of plastic
He keeps on his desk for saving lone quarters
He finds in his pants taking the rolls to his bank.
She saves paper money in her bag from trips
To the grocery store and other venues he knows
Nothing about if they don’t serve dinner or beer.
She knows the size of shirts, shoes, even the hole
At which he tightens his belt and where he goes
To the dentist. His practical knowledge is limited
To museums and getting flowers for her birthday.
She never leaves home without makeup and doing
Her hair. They joke about planning for everything
Even their graves: she says his stone should read
Still Talking, he wants Still Shopping on hers.
Geometry of Death in a Painting
Here and not here the pillar and the sphere
As in a still life by Cézanne
No rectangle of a cracker box
In a Morandi either
Far outside the mobile
There are almost no triangles in art
But for the faint itch of Malevich
And Russian Constructivists.
But in today’s collage
The papers wear the architecture of pyramids
Pasted flat on a garbage dump
Beneath cracks and scratches in a black sky
Shaped like two stealth bombers in a pileup of wings
Held taut by strips of measuring tape
And an egg squeezed in between until memory bleeds
Of a final flight made in the darkness of night.
A Few Things Have to Change
This is one of those times when the water just sits in the Bay
Like a blue scarf hardly rippling
And the squawking gulls fly up in a haunting ballet
As the tired body waits for spring
Its every muscle filled with a memory of hauling sail.
If you want most things to stay the same, they say
A few things have to change.
Some of the gear has been put away on order
And the captain retired to crew.
No one knows this when they are young and oiled
Weighed down with the power of a bright new machine.
You watch the first morning sun-rays stream across the Bay
Until the chill eases in your bones
As if every day is either a good day or maybe a last.
Michael Salcman, a child of the Holocaust and survivor of polio, is former chairman of neurosurgery at University of Maryland and president of The Contemporary Museum. His poems appear in Barrow Street, Blue Unicorn, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, Notre Dame Review, Raritan, and Smartish Pace. His books include The Clock Made of Confetti (nominated for The Poets’ Prize); The Enemy of Good Is Better; Poetry in Medicine: An Anthology of Poems About Doctors, Patients, Illness, and Healing; A Prague Spring, Before & After (Sinclair Poetry Prize winner); Shades & Graces (Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize winner); Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (2022); and Crossing the Tape (2024).