Michael Salcman has published recent poems in such magazines as Barrow Street, Harvard Review, and Raritan. His fourth chapbook, Stones in Our Pockets,  and first collection, The Clock Made of Confetti, are forthcoming in 2007

Salcman, Michael

English

University of San Francisco

Ontario ReviewVolume 67 Fall/Winter 2007–08 Article 18October 2014Sea Nettles, Clearing the Brambles, Everything Butthe AshesMichael SalcmanFollow this and additional works at: http://repository.usfca.edu/ontarioreviewPart of the Poetry CommonsFor more information, please contact southerr@usfca.edu.Recommended CitationSalcman, Michael (2014) "Sea Nettles, Clearing the Brambles, Everything But the Ashes," Ontario Review: Vol. 67, Article 18.Available at: http://repository.usfca.edu/ontarioreview/vol67/iss1/18T h r e e P o e m s MICHAEL SALCMAN S e a N e t t l e s —Chrysaora quinquecirrha The trembling lampshade heads and shivering arms have no strange beauty to speak of— no phosphor glows at night. No bones, no heart, no brains, no eyes. The day I no longer recall their name I feel the onset of age while hauling up the anonymous curling slime of tentacles on the anchor chain. Whatever I once called them there's no swimming in the midst of this, so many small ones float by our boat there's no safety reclining on a raft either, the conditions precisely as they wish: hot and humid, a briny mix. If relief comes, hours later it's not the name but the knowledge of how forgetting goes: life's awful and terrible things wiped first some small resentments next, before steering towards a final music, the mind set free of memory. Published by USF Scholarship: a digital repository @ Gleeson Library | Geschke Center, 2014MICHAEL SALCMAN • 173 C l e a r i n g t h e B r a m b l e s In Old Saybrook, the braided trunks of cedars shade my Father's face, his legs askew with the effort of carting lawn chairs to where we wait, his gravitational platform deserting his desire to play the host still going strong at ninety-five. Drinks in our hands we drowse in the sun; I watch him snatch at sleep like a cat, gone and back in minutes, his neurons sputtering lamps decades past the use-by date of his brain. His nose twitches with the sun, its light flickers in the maples and birches, rouses swarms of flies and gnats. Later, my Father and I put seed in the birder but no cardinals come. He gets up to work the brambles, pulling up branches and straggling creepers, snapping them in two on his knee. He's clearing this field for someone to sell to. E v e r y t h i n g B u t t h e A s h e s If a man saves a single life it's as if the saved the entire world—The Talmud Too weak to kill himself, Weisenthal was saved by starvation. The ninety-seven pounds that remained on his release from Malthausen couldn't stop his brain from thinking of ways to remember the others. For the brain is a savage beast, it eats when and what no other organ eats, so the head and eyes become as large as a child's, the body starves extremities shrink and the belly develops a paunch. . .. He said I am the last... the one who can still speak, I will repeat and repeat and repeat this year's inventory: http://repository.usfca.edu/ontarioreview/vol67/iss1/18174 • ONTARIO REVIEW bound for Berlin, twenty-five freight cars of women's hair, 248 of clothing, a hundred boxcars filled with shoes and jewelry taken from the Jews; 400,000 watches, four thousand carats of diamonds, one hundred and sixty tons of wedding rings the Germans shipped everything but their ashes. He knew how a grand indictment like this might fit on a lading slip, how a number might hold a memory. After the war his brain was still hungry so it went hunting; Ecce homo! In Sao Paolo, Franz Stangl of Treblinka and Franz Wagner of So bib or; in Argentina, Josef Schwammberger of Poland; in Vienna, Karl Silberbauer, the man who'd arrested Anne, working as a policeman. Not counting Eichmann that group was his biggest meal. His brain snacked on frau Ryan, a housewife in Queens, where the former queen of Maidenek lived without her whip, and bit on a Romanian killer in Michigan who hid as an archbishop. Not that he saw through every disguise: he missed the Angel of Death. All in all, he spent fifty years in Vienna, a city that hated him like a poke in the eye, surrounded by file cards and photos, affidavits and writs not a scrap was wasted. This was the life he had to give and the metabolism of starvation its special gift. When he died in his sleep at ninety-six everything was shipped but the ashes. Published by USF Scholarship: a digital repository @ Gleeson Library | Geschke Center, 2014

Sea Nettles, Clearing the Brambles, Everything But the Ashes

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Sea Nettles, Clearing the Brambles, Everything But the Ashes

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