GEMÜTLICHKEIT

Despite a vow taken after the war
the occasional German word
escaped my father’s mouth
in a hail of Yiddish spit.

Gemütlichkeit was one such word,
by actual vote their favorite
in Berlin and the German side
of Prague—where it held
the warmth of a house alive
with comfort,
and so many other meanings
you could hear it breathing
with books and a cat, friends
and wife, enough warm food
and drinks like a fiery slivovitz.

He knew
the wet sound of this word
how it unwound slowly on his tongue
syllable by syllable,
and how it took some time to forget
where and when it was spoken

Last.

*

Michael Salcman: poet, physician and art historian, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland. Poems appear in Barrow Street, Blue Unicorn, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, and Smartish Pace. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, his popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on medical subjects, A Prague Spring, Before & After, winner 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize, and Shades & Graces: New Poems, inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Book Prize (2020). Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (2022) and the forthcoming Crossing the Tape (2024) are published by Spuyten Duyvil.