Five Poems by Michael Salcman
10-CENT CITY
Years before John Waters, Café Hon & Homicide,
before galleries sprung up in Hampden
& trendy stores cluttered the Avenue,
before stretch Hummer limos came to Patterson Park
for drugs & girls & tapas
and millionaires lived on Fleet Street,
Baltimore was really wild.
When stockbrokers sold stocks & bonds in bars & restaurants
& Joe Sheppard painted Blaze Starr
shaking her thing at the Two O’Clock Club,
artists & models lived on East Baltimore Street,
over The Showbar,
where Shimkee sold popcorn with “a halo of flies”
and Handsome Pete was so besieged by the girls at the Gaiety
Perry’s eyes bugged out from begging
for some of the action to be laid off on him.
Back when bookmakers stood on every curb & corner with a horse
or whore at their side,
& barkers on The Block sucked you in with their hip hop jive,
Mad Man Batche swung his saxophone like an ax
& Stinky Fields told jokes in a dive,
Baltimore was really wild.
The barkeeps made more from cashing a check
than selling a drink, raking in change
from the first one percent on a few hundred dollars
& charging anything they could get on a lawyer’s check
for two thousand or more,
and the bookies in numbers and horses
could pay down a bar with their bets
after years of knocking it back & blowing on dice.
Back when the wise guys made their rounds like doctors
at nighttime, from the Park Plaza on Charles
to the Bucket of Blood on Madison
& never settled a tab for a hoisted beer
or chatted-up a babe until they found their way back
still breathing—
Baltimore was less polite.
Even the swells with keys
to get only the best, at the Gas Lamp or the Playboy,
needed a strong jaw to come out alive from some of those places.
And now they’ve sold The Dime,
auctioned it bit by bit,
because we’re too sedate to miss the wonders contained
in our urban museum:
a miniature steak house made out of match sticks,
a castle of corks,
not to mention that giant ball of twine,
from Haussner’s in Highlandtown,
and the anatomically correct cast resin torso for seven fifty,
or the nine-foot Peruvian Amazon mummy—
three thousand dollars lying in her case.
They practically gave our treasures away:
knocking down a finger painting made by Betsy the Chimp
in nineteen fifty-five
and the genuine buck-toothed vampire duck.
I wonder who bought the fake leather jacket
decorated in human hair
for less than eighty-five bucks?
All of it’s gone, the Gator Girl, the Giant Bat,
the two-headed goose & the albatross,
all that once lived or not
in that bastion of the bizarre
gone in an hour or less.
And now, no one drunk or sober or self-deluded
will ever know for sure what was fake or real
or invented by Barnum
& rescued by The Dime
when New York was crazy & Paris went wild
& Baltimore was stranger than strange.
THE OTHER
In your absence
the other
provides a surfeit of love
without high breasts
long legs
or the black-brown gash
that curves between your buttocks
like some old embryological drawing
of the bifurcation of the seed.
AGAINST THE WALL
—for sculptor Miroslaw Balka
The light’s on in the basement
where the box it came in
sits like a coffin.
Upstairs two steel canes,
twisted like DNA,
and covered with soap on wire bristles,
break off crusts on our carpet.
When we bolt them up
each post's as tall
as his mouth would be
if braced against the wall,
the subject of an interrogation;
their tails sit on the floor
like the end of his gut.
The soap's not ivory colored
but comes from the earth, yellow and gray
where the bodies were dumped
in Polish soil.
Before these twisted spines
the artist’s placed a broken soup-spoon
like a small chimney,
its silver skin flamed
and blackened with ash,
so that its bowl—
emptied of sacramental wine
and the blessing of hope—
prays expectantly.
ONE HAND CLAPPING
This comfort’s mine—the phone doesn’t ring
it’s forgotten how.
(Pouring another scotch)
In your hand fingers like clouds
too soft to push buttons, too white for a chat.
And anyhow I’ve misplaced its cordless body
under a pile of books (damn)
their spines like stone tablets scattered
in some ancient Agora
so that any sound the phone might make
will be muffled by my unstudied wisdom.
On the slight chance you remember to call
spare me your usual explanation:
life’s worn you out so bad
it’s erased the need to hear from the lips
you once felt everywhere on your body,
back when our love was openly out there
in a room not merely one’s own.
TRADUTTORE, TRADITORE
March, 1933
Munich
My Dear Il Duce:
my publisher informs me that you have outbid
Hurst & Blackett and Houghton Mifflin for the right
to translate my book into Italian.
My pleasure at one day seeing my words cast in
the language of Dante is second only to the joy
of knowing the transfer was wired
to Franz Eher anonymously and in cash.
I thank you with all my heart.
Yours in fraternity,
AH
May, 1934
Rome
Signore Treves:
my compliments on completing so quickly
your felicitous translation, a credit to the cleverness
of your people. I trust the harsh pages
referring to them caused no undue difficulty or pain.
As you already stand handsomely rewarded
for your efforts, in the only way that really counts,
I’m sure you won’t mind if I must remove your name
from the spine of “La Mia Battaglia”;
this regrettable request came from our German partners
who wish to discount your presence.
Be assured dear Angelo, I remain
your loyal friend and proud publisher,
Valentino Bompiani
Seventh Circle of Hell
November, 2004
My Dear Hitler:
news has reached me from a Papal nuncio
(no doubt via his prayers)
of the recent revelation of our little project.
The transfer of 53,625 marks in that crucial year
now appears excessive to a suspicious few
cosmopolitans
who assume I really paid for your political campaign.
You mustn’t believe I wasn’t sincere;
I told Valentino how much I dreamed to write
a book like yours but was shamed into inaction
by its many excellent passages,
some of which (unfortunately) have been found
underlined in my own hand.
This has further damaged my image
as Father of all the people
and inconveniences my granddaughter Alessandra
in her duties as a rightist deputy in Europe’s parliament.
I’ve tried to find your number with little success
so I must post this myself.
Connections here are deplorable
Yours as ever
Benito (Mussolini)