Robert Charles Basner

For Medicine, Memoriam
-“I swear by Apollo physician, and Asclepius surgeon…”

Breath on bone, who
terrored trust

against me saw
sworn scalpel

mistaking biologic
for belief; mistaking

breathing for
compelled. But I

swear graver scathe
has been God’s,

who has mistaken
for aged, ashen;

mistaken, for medicine,
memoriam.


“The Decent and Devout People of Ys”
-after the piano prelude “La Cathédrale Engloutie” of Claude Debussy, 1910”

You hold us the
“decent and devout

people of Ys”
drowned; by

such bells,
blessed, and for

your own last
hour, blessing. But

we intoned
only inner even

as Ys’ menace
was most meant.

We appear as hands
arpeggio? You hear

chords poured
more melodic than

the ache of Ys?
We hear only

octaves wholly
white over

sun, wholly
black beneath

time. Left on your
piano:

the music of
drowned music.

(Note: -The title and quoted part of the text are from Sudip Bose, “Out of the Watery Depths. Debussy’s Sunken Cathedral.” The American Scholar, June 8, 2017).


“The Violinist at the Window”
-after Henri Matisse

Cloud-narrowed balcony,
but the hands

of the violinist
at the 1918 Nice window,

eased, are landscape
beyond curt

color, and are
as death-known as

hands that would
lift horror’s violin

from its case
after Auschwitz,

and ritornello
rose amber

rosin scent
secluded sound. Grotesquely

holy, its composer
had endured

unendurable
end that he could

ask his final wrought, “you
had wrest; your mar

was meant, pieced with
palest-purposed

pitches that stunned
the nerve of

beautiful of what
won’t be— the rest

refused—but
had you gift?”

(“its composer”: Gideon Klein, 1919-1945)


About the Author

Robert Charles Basner, heir to the farming and fielding of a place that has slipped shyly, slowly, southwesterly off the main Catskill Mountains, is also Professor Emeritus of Medicine, Columbia University, and Special Lecturer in Medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He is an internationally recognized physician and biomedical researcher, author, editor, editorialist, and educator. He has published poetry in numerous journals including the Columbia Review, Promethean, and Chronogram, and has been an invited reader at the Woodstock Poetry Society; the Lace Mill in Kingston; Perfect Pitch: The Hudson Valley New Year’s Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza; and the Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City. He has been featured on Planet Poet-Words in Space, an edition of the Writer’s Voice on WIOX Community Radio. An avid member of the Woodstock Poetry Society and The Poetry Annex, he lives in the Hudson Valley, and travels to the Berkeley hills. He is working on a first collection of verse, as well as a sequence of musical settings for voice and viola.

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