Kenneth Salzmann’s blog

Excerpts from Lane Change: Poems by Kenneth Salzmann (54pp)

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Progress notes

 

"I want to be treated by a doctor who has read Macbeth."

 

-Jaroslav Pelikan

 

The doctor is

a 52 y/o man coming into

our lives

unbidden.

A preliminary examination

reveals him to be

sound of science,

if disengaged.

His understanding of

wonder

is impressively restricted.

He denies reading Macbeth

and reports having known

no connection

between cytogenetic studies

and the mysteries we note.

The doctor appears

to be clinically deficient

in Shakespeare,

as indicated by

standard methods

for describing a stain

in efforts to know

the nature of blood.

 

(Progress Notes was originally published in The Comstock Review)

 

1969

 

If fifty thousand candles can be

the waxy, whispered remains of dead boys

in a cold, November rain,

then Kilby might wrap this night

in chords seized from an acoustic guitar,

as if melody waits unformed

somewhere near the Ellipse,

as if harmony can settle the score

and not swell unexpectedly

thirty years from now when a blood-red BMW

points up the 101,

purposeful enough.

 

If a drunk and stumbling bum can insist

against the 2 a.m. terrors of Arlington Cemetery

that we imbibe his history

and heft an icy, dented mortar shell

made slick by the Potomac mist,

then Salzmann might write a poem

to reduce or enlarge

this rainy night of America's soul,

as if cadences tried out on the Mall

can settle into lines

that won't overstay their welcome

and float back insistently

thirty years from now when promises and poems

are petals scratched from southern soils,

then gone.

 

(1969 has appeared in The Peninsula Review and Afterthoughts)

 

Lines In Late April

 

 

April has been characteristically brief,

coming in on a promise, but somehow

always circling the point.

 

Taconic streams swollen by the melting mountains

push impatiently against matted leaves and fallen

branches that seem to belong somewhere else.

 

Nightfall is a gentle rustling on the forest floor

and the piercing laughter of predators that slip through shadows

and edge along the lake where moonlight descends.

 

One day, April is icy, grasping and resolute.

Another time, the impudent, golden reach of forsythia

arches against the likelihood across gunmetal gray skies.

 

April ice can slip in unexpectedly with the sinking sun

to swallow tender sprouts like a crusty tumor.

Ice lays waste to fragile shoots on old wood.

 

In the end, the ice in April is every bit as fragile

as those new buds setting out a plan for summer.

These gnarled bones of birches have lasted another winter.

 

(Lines in Late April originally appeared in Rattle)

 

and some newer poems . . .

 

The persistence of ashes

 

In fact, it is the roses that remain.

 

They enter the house one by one all summer long,

and longer. I place them on the mantle beside the urn

where they will expend their pinks and reds petitioning

what gods they know for the persistence of your ashes.

 

And they will weep petals across the hearth.

 

At times, I catch myself believing in the immutability

of ashes, as if we are of this place or any other. As if

the generations that go on spreading like ash will turn

one day to the fixed notion of an unwavering place that is home.

 

The roses were planted fifty years ago or more, a neighbor said,

by a woman who went about, as people do, growing flowers

and growing old until there was nothing left but roses to testify

that she had ever been. And we set out to make a home amid the thorns

and petals of her life. We nested in the oak-lined rooms that remembered

all her moods and all her movements, but only briefly. And you took it upon

yourself to cleanse and nourish those roses, perhaps in hopes of sanctifying

a  transitory life followed seamlessly by ash and bone.

 

(The Persistence of Ashes has appeared in Front Range Review and is included in Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers [Codhill Press])

 

What but the music?

(for Ronn and Vicki)

 

“All 1960s and 1970s grads of Kent County high schools are invited

 to a musical reunion at the Rehoboth Beach bandstand. “

 

Maybe graying women and balding men are gathering

right now in every improbable town that hugs

a two-digit highway pointing vaguely toward America.

 

Maybe it’s turning out we are unremarkable, after all—

unique and universal, just like all the rest.

 

Maybe it’s nothing but the same comfortable crawl

every generation makes toward first things and well-worn

memories, when they start to notice the obituaries

are piling up higher than anyone ever thought they could.

 

Or maybe it is the music, after all.

 

What but the music might have orchestrated

forgotten revolutions and unforgettable kisses?

What but the music underscored every presumed

triumph and defeat, drew us into church basements

and into cheap apartments in bad neighborhoods,

ripped down walls, egged us on, played us out?

 

(Some of us never thought we’d make it this far,

and some of us were right.)

 

Caesar Rodney had nothing on us,

with his cancered ride and fast flourish.

We rallied, too, and stood against an empire

on the village green. Within crying distance,

the bodies were piled 50,000-high.

 

But maybe a soundtrack laid down decades ago

can permeate our souls and chart our lives

until one day we begin to see—long after we’ve

stopped looking—that astonishing rhythms

really have changed the world.

 

What but the music might have bound us then?

What but the music might bind us again?

 

 

 

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