| Five Poems by Michael Salcman |
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| by Michael Salcman |
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place your bets
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)
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