Just passing by on my way to breakfast
I could tell it was Earl from the HPI,
the History of my friend’s Present Illness
up high on the auditorium’s chalkboard
at BCH, all those multiple admissions
to Boston City Hospital for liver disease
and pancreatitis, his left hand and forearm
shot off in Korea. We used to go out singing
and drinking in run-down neighborhoods,
me doing a white baritone, him strumming
on my Spanish guitar, a matchbook cover
folded in his metal claw. In the early Sixties
we played folk music in dark living rooms
where they sang along drinking cheap wine
in paper cups and bitter beer in the can.
Earl said he wanted to die on the hospital steps
and explode like a star. That was the last time
he took my guitar and I never saw either again.
Roxbury, 1968
Michael Salcman is the former chairman of neurosurgery, University of Maryland and president of The Contemporary Museum, a child of the Holocaust and a survivor of polio. Poems in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, Notre Dame Review, 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, classic and contemporary poems on medicine, A Prague Spring (Sinclair Poetry Prize winner), Shades & Graces (winner Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize), Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (2022) and Crossing the Tape (2024).