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Self-Portrait with Another Person

I wake up wanting you, and after
You reshape a blanket and some sheets
Behind my back, I’m still thinking
I can feel my leg keep talking to you
Until I sleep warmly dreaming
In your atmospheric absence.

Later making love we hold hands
And kiss all over like the rain on grass
Until the morning hours pass
As familiar and strange as ever,
Until our small hearts cool
And our moistness dries
And love unmasked becomes abstraction.

—
Michael Salcman is the former chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland. His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, and numerous other journals. His books include Poetry in Medicine, an anthology of medical poems; A Prague Spring (winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize); Shades & Graces (Danial Hoffman Book Prize winner); Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems; and, most recently, Crossing the Tape.

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