Bob From Parkville on The Fan

Bob From Parkville on The Fan

By Michael Salcman

He calls every talk show from seven A.M. until four.
Must be eighty at least. He’s all about the detour.
Argues mostly about sports, sometimes politics,
in a voice which has the soft hush of a respirator,
declaims the greatness of Williams,
(an opinion which I share),
and the evil of Republicans.
Bob recites when each childhood hero first made
a hundred thousand dollars—Ted and Willie, Joe
of the hated Yankees—a sum he himself never got
and how Williams nobly rejected a raise
or bonus towards the end when he hit only 254.
I see Bob wrapped in a shawl, oil lamp lit at his desk,
a portrait of Roosevelt or Melville on the wall.
Imagine the wife’s been gone a decade or more
killed off by the endless rant. Bob can’t breathe
in empty air so he fills it with ghosts
before the host breaks the connection with a squib:
that was Bob from Parkville (as if none of us knows.)

Michael Salcman: poet, physician and art historian, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum. Poems appear in Arts & Letters, The Café Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, and Poet Lore. 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 doctors, patients, illness & healing, A Prague Spring, Before & After, winner of the 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize, and Shades & Graces, inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020). 

Jason David Córdova is an illustrator in Puerto Rico. Some of his art can be seen on Instagram at @jasoni72.