BEFORE HIM STOOD YESTERDAY

                                             —from Bate’s life of Ted Hughes

To place the work above the life in youth is fine
even if a kind of slow suicide, a way of working hard
to salvage time. The distress of this strategy is mine,
it spilt for years on the innocents who loved me.

I knew the risk before reading the life of a child
named Hughes—growing in the shadow of Scout Rock,
a Mytholmroyd cliff—the effort made him run wild
with expectation until his delicate nature exploded

like a neutron star in an energetic torrent of books.
I too had no escape from a rockslide into similar work—
any touch of a book’s spine and my hands shook
with foreboding, every opening seemed a closing.

Caught in my like whimsy Ted may have felt the same 
as I about Wordsworth’s shepherd who shared my name.

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 Barrow Street, Blue Unicorn, 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).