In Parkway Time
Michael Salcman
Each day the far-off mountains grow
And I feel smaller
Even as the cracks in the pavement
Come closer to my eyes
After another fall
Where the ants are as near as dust
And the unseen bird in the poplar tree
Refuses to stop his hooting.
I slowly rise from my chair
And cross the carpet of stone pavers
To watch the cars on Northern Parkway speeding
In an attempt to catch up to their own noise
And the limits of time.
None of my words hurry off to see the crash
On the corner
Its sound a spiraling marble
In my ear’s helix
As it clears the engine of history
Piston free on another planet.
I am a retired physician and teacher of art history, a child of the Holocaust and a survivor of polio. I was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. My poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Blue Unicorn, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, Raritan and Smartish Pace. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti (nominated for The Poets’ Prize); The Enemy of Good Is Better; Poetry in Medicine, a widely used anthology of classic and contemporary poems on medical matters (Persea Books, 2015); A Prague Spring, Before & After (winner Sinclair Poetry Prize); Shades & Graces, inaugural winner of the Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (2020); Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (2022) and more recently Crossing the Tape: New Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024).