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MICHAEL SALCMAN
Michael Salcman: former chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum. Poems appear in Arts & Letters, Café Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, and New Letters. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, his anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness & healing, A Prague Spring, Before & After, winner of the 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize, and Shades & Graces, inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020).
Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems was
published by Spuyten Duyvil in January, 2022.
Blue Smoke Inside My Head
Today I saw a blue jay land on a backyard poplar
While I puffed away on a Parejo from Havana
Its blue smoke rising inside my head
Behind my eyes and along my spinal cord
Bristling like a tree or worn-out toilet brush
In Baltimore.
This season I’m covered in blue—
My mouth, my throat, my unhappy mood dressed
In the world’s favorite color by actual vote,
Coiling and uncoiling like a blue racer’s spawn
As my brain’s cyanotype fills with musical notes.
This year there was no fire just the smoke
It seemed to extinguish every hope; I know
The ancient Greeks had no word for the color blue,
See Homer’s wine-red sea and rosy-fingered dawn.
Today I saw a blue jay land on a backyard poplar
While I puffed away on a Parejo from Havana
Its blue smoke rising inside my head
Behind my eyes and along my spinal cord
Bristling like a tree or worn-out toilet brush
In Baltimore.
This season I’m covered in blue—
My mouth, my throat, my unhappy mood dressed
In the world’s favorite color by actual vote,
Coiling and uncoiling like a blue racer’s spawn
As my brain’s cyanotype fills with musical notes.
This year there was no fire just the smoke
It seemed to extinguish every hope; I know
The ancient Greeks had no word for the color blue,
See Homer’s wine-red sea and rosy-fingered dawn.
THE FIRE INSIDE YOUR HEAD
Here lies consciousness in the brain stem, its power plant
of energetic fibers traveling up towards the corpus callosum,
this picture captured in the moment of wakefulness spread
to both the right and left brains, just above the blushing red
fingerprint of a small guided missile computer or tree
(your cerebellum) tilted up from its basement, and everywhere
spent energy washed in the blue sulci between the red-green
forests of curving cortex, where crystalline fluid bathes
the brain clean of exfoliated toxins and metabolic spillage.
On our left, the heavy frontal lobe looks planted, facing down
as if the head’s engaged in an acrobatic flip, its owner
tumbling on a floor mat or reaching for the lower most bar
in a qualifying gymnastic stunt. Or else this head is bent
to a research bench or at a writer’s desk in a concentrated instant
of thought worrying over an equation or rhythmic sentence.
We can never know whose brain this is or what our alternate self
is doing but share in its creaturely pride, having painted the scan
with colorful flames to highlight our machine’s mysterious activity.
Here lies consciousness in the brain stem, its power plant
of energetic fibers traveling up towards the corpus callosum,
this picture captured in the moment of wakefulness spread
to both the right and left brains, just above the blushing red
fingerprint of a small guided missile computer or tree
(your cerebellum) tilted up from its basement, and everywhere
spent energy washed in the blue sulci between the red-green
forests of curving cortex, where crystalline fluid bathes
the brain clean of exfoliated toxins and metabolic spillage.
On our left, the heavy frontal lobe looks planted, facing down
as if the head’s engaged in an acrobatic flip, its owner
tumbling on a floor mat or reaching for the lower most bar
in a qualifying gymnastic stunt. Or else this head is bent
to a research bench or at a writer’s desk in a concentrated instant
of thought worrying over an equation or rhythmic sentence.
We can never know whose brain this is or what our alternate self
is doing but share in its creaturely pride, having painted the scan
with colorful flames to highlight our machine’s mysterious activity.