Michael Salcman, M.D.

Baltimore, USA

MICHAEL SALCMAN, born in Czechoslovakia, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. Poems appear in Arts & Letters, The Café Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, and Poet Lore. His work has received six nominations for a Pushcart Prize. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises, 2007), nominated for The Poets' Prize, The Enemy of Good is Better (Orchises, 2011), and Poetry in Medicine, his popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness & healing (Persea Books, 2015).  A Prague Spring, Before & After (2016), won the 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press. Shades & Graces: New Poems, (Spuyten Duyvil, New York, 2020), is the inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize. Salcman is a poetry editor at the Baltimore Review and art editor at the Little Patuxent Review.

First draft of the poem: April 15, 2020; “completed” 12-5-2020

LISTENING TO DIFFERENT TRAINS

—after Steve Reich

In an empty house in our silent neighborhood

you can crank up the stereo as loud as you want 

to play Tchaikovsky or Beethoven symphonies

until your eardrums bleed. Of course

this strategy doesn’t work with a Bach sonata

for solo violin; pure consolation requires quiet.

After listening a month I find the perfect noise 

to carry me out of self-pity. I turn to Different Trains,

an icon of Minimalism, its screeching string quartet

and looped tape deck of a black porter yelling 

all aboard for Chicago and New York, 

and its composer with the strangely ironic name,

so that all aboard really means the train to Birkenau,

and never fails to flip the switch in my chest. 

At its end I don’t feel like standing and cheering, 

even at earth shaking decibels, but stand and pace 

with nervous anxiety at a true understanding of hate.

The Germans knew what they were doing, 

but you can’t blame a tiny bit of RNA for recruiting

its own gang of co-conspirators right and left.