Michael Salcman		EMERGENCY  MEDITATION   Flat on my back on a cot in the hall, the smell of our love-making fades from my fingertips—it's 2 in the morning as I wait for assistants to open the head of my patient like a persimmon, layer upon layer until the killer clot and arterial bubble deep in the brain are caught in the light of my microscope. Hope squeezed out from our love rides in my veins like anesthetic gas, floods me with forgetfulness, lets me sleep precious moments before I must chase the orphaning of eight year old boys, the widowing of young wives; tonight I will share your anodyne with those nearer death than I, waiting after loving on a winter's eve. --------------------------------------------------------------- from the chapbook Stones In Our Pockets (Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007)		THE COUNTRY OF GHOSTS   After sixty years I came back to the country of ghosts; in sixty years I will still be a ghost.   In Poland we were poor and superstitious like the Poles, in Germany arrogant and meticulous.   But in Prague and Bratislava our ghosts were set free to play Mozart, read Freud, be Kafka—   even Einstein. Then the buildings and streets were set free of us, even the Old New Synagogue is free.   Every alley and restaurant was scrubbed clean of us, of the stink and the beauty of us.   But there's plenty of room for one more of us free in the country of ghosts.   (from  Third Wednesday, Winter 2008)