BIO
Michael Salcman is a poet, physician, and art historian. His poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Arts & Letters, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore and Ontario Review. Salcman is the author of four chapbooks. His books include The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises, 2007), nominated for The Poets’ Prize, The Enemy of Good is Better (Orchises, 2011), Poetry in Medicine, his popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness & healing (Persea Books, 2015) and A Prague Spring, Before & After (2016), winner of the 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press.
.
What a Strange Thing to Happen to a Young Boy
—George Oppen to Paul Auster
.
Mortality hangs heavy on me
whenever the 29-year-old trainer at the gym
predicts a world war certain to come in his lifetime
but not in mine. He reminds me of this
once a week as if I should be glad
not that I want to see his prediction come true
but I don’t want to know
I’m sure to miss it and why.
And the movie stars today, how young they are
sitting in the theater how bad I feel about never seeing
the many good films they will make in the future,
how they will sing and dance but not me.
At seventy my mind retreats to its rocking chair:
I’m glad to watch the leaves fall,
fairly certain I will do so once more
but when summer comes, I worry each time I drop anchor
in a river or bay is the last time I will see
these beautiful banks and trees
my future engulfed in the past.
*****
