Michael Salcman - Spring 2008 Feature

THE CORTLAND REVIEW

MICHAEL SALCMAN - POETRY - SPRING 2008 FEATURE

FEATURE
	Debra Allbery
		"The Third Image": Constellations of Correspondence in Emily Dickinson, Joseph Cornell, and Charles Simic, an essay on ekphrastic poetry and the notion of poetry and painting as "the sister arts."

	Debra Allbery
		Three ekphrastic poems: "Courbet," "No Tutor but the North," and "How to Explain a Dead Hare."
	POETRY
		Betty Adcock Charles Coté Martyn Crucefix Burt Kimmelman Eric Pankey Michael Salcman Nicholas Samaras Jim Tilley Gloria Vando Eleanor Wilner
	Interview
		A Note on Fictional Truth, a Conversation with Ed Pavlić, by Andrew John McFadyen-Ketchum.
	Book Review
		"A Change of Maps" by Carolyne Wright—Book Review, by David Rigsbee.

Michael Salcman

			Michael Salcman, a physician, brain scientist, and essayist on the visual arts, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. Recent poems appear in New Letters, the Ontario Review, Harvard Review, Raritan, Notre Dame Review, River Styx, and New York Quarterly. His work has been heard on NPR's All Things Considered and in Euphoria, a documentary on the brain and creativity (2005). His first collection, The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises Press, Washington, DC), and fourth chapbook, Stones In Our Pockets (Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin-Madison), were published in 2007.

In the Lost Movie of Its Making, the Red Canvas

—for Kirk Varnedoe

Here at your feet, the flat bed of metaphor fell:
blood red, heart red, the wine-dark sea.

In the first frame of a lost movie
you throw black skeins of paint

like a coagulum or tracery of neurons
igniting the movement of your arm,

the dance of your feet; you thinking jazz,
me thinking Yeats. Second frame lost:

dabs of aluminum spilled from liberty boats built
at the Navy Yard in Brooklyn

or a silver nosed bomb hung over
a Japanese sea. In the third frame lost

a fugitive word or phrase signed "Jackson" or "Lee".
then "Hans, I am nature" in your seminal code,

white twists of DNA cross and re-cross
the red and black arcs.

It's the last frame lost and the back end of the brush
flings midnight at an arabesque of cracks,

a memory perhaps of your father peeing atop
the Indian rocks, showing you how it's done,

his poor son so lost in the film of finding the painting
pours its meaning on and on and stitches it up.