~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Michael Salcman

Objects Removed for Study

Like the sign in every museum says

In this glass case or on that wall

Something has disappeared

Only temporarily we hope

If nothing should change in our memory.

Meaning no adjectival nouns are missing here

Just the time and energy of presence

As it stands in a corner or hangs on a wall

And says look at me

For beauty or understanding

Like a person might

Such artworks as needy of care as we are

But rarely as vocal

Unless a playable violin or cello

By Strad or Guarneri.

As time moves towards us

How much do we really miss one of several stones

In a jewelry vitrine

Or a single Achaean cup from a crowded wing

Devoted to Ancient Art?

We may or may not be brought to tears

By the loss of a small Dutch portrait

Rendered on a copper medallion

Or worse the loan of a favorite Rembrandt

And the seemingly sudden absence of a Vermeer

A cause certain of heartache or frustration.

Why isn't it here we ask ourselves

And do we remember who stood at our side

When we last shared the experience?

Are they still alive or in need of repair?

Perhaps that will come later when we too are gone

And no one has hung out a sign for us.

Michael Salcman, poet, physician, and art historian, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum. Poems appear in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Café Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, and Smartish Pace. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, his popular 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: New Poems, the inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize in 2020. Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2022.