The band of cloth across
my arm cinched tightly with
velcro, thermometer
in my closed mouth beeping
normalcy, electrodes
pasted to my legs and
chest, the machine's cursor
scratching the on and off
switches of my pulsing
heart - then the stethoscope,
I breathe in and out. A
needle is inserted
into a vein, and the
red blood surges into
a glass tube with a white
label, then a second.
Finally, standing by
myself, leaning over
the toilet, I hold my
limp penis into a
plastic cup and piss - that
most natural of acts -
yellow liquid rising
to the brim. And I am
grateful for this soft touch.
Tuft of Lavender Leeds, England 11.7.06
The tuft of Lavender
and little bees in the
sun, as if they were all -
how odd that somewhere there
might be another one,
the flowering of the
day, this sun, some other
place where we might sit for
awhile, or never move.
Summer's End
A squawk in the
bushes then a
red flitting from
branch to branch, the
cardinal in
the cool sun, days
ago the light
bright and hot, now
no doubt what will
come - a squirrel
skitters along
the fence and leaps
into a tree.
Bio
Burt Kimmelman has published five collections of poetry -- Musaics (1992), First Life (2000), The Pond at Cape May Point (2002), a collaboration with the painter Fred Caruso, Somehow (2005), and There Are Words (2007). For over a decade, he was Senior Editor of Poetry New York: A Journal of Poetry and Translation . He is a professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology and the author of two book-length literary studies: The "Winter Mind": William Bronk and American Letters (1998); and, The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (1996, paperback 1999). He also edited The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (2005).
