Donald Levin
____________________________________________
Infusion Blues
for Jamie
You lay still, stunned,
pinned to specimen bags
draining fine lines of fluids--
yellow, gastric green, frothing brown
through thin tubes curving
inside the pit of your nose
attached to your stomach's button
pushed into your anus and
poking the tiny eye of your penis.
Another, taped to a thread-
like vein on the back of your hand
pumped in clear liquids, nutrition,
medicines, infusing your clogged body
in the steady mechanical rhythm
of a Rolling Stones riff:
Some kind of ventilator
Some kind of ventilator
every three seconds, all night long
as, outside your darkened room
the bright racket of late shift nurses
tend other children trying to rest.
At some point during the night
before the dreadful medical men
materialize in your room for morning rounds
to loom over your bags and tubes
and scowl with masks of concern
over what progress you are making
tethered to their metrical technology,
I lean over you, quiet child,
bristling with throbbing tubes, in and out,
and in the chill air try to rub warmth
across your bent back and tight arms
urge comfort through immobile hips
my sorry efforts meant to sow
false assurance this will all end soon.
Laying patient as a pilot light
you will not rouse, but do
instruct me to defy this state
with stillness and perfect calm
and a sigh, imperceptibly small,
huffed through the one side of your nose
the doctors neglected to stuff.
I am a Boston-born, Detroit-raised writer, editor, and teacher. I am the author of a novel, THE HOUSE OF GRINS (1992), and my poetry and short fiction have appeared in print and e-journals including Red Rock Review, Gin Bender Poetry Review, Saucyvox, Literati Review, Lotus Blooms Journal, Delirium Journal, Stirring,Ohio Renaissance Review, and The Metro Times. I was featured poet in the March 2003 issue of Lotus Blooms Journal, and won the Metro Times summer fiction contest in 1998. Currently I am associate professor of English at Marygrove College in Detroit, where I also edit a new literary journal, The Maxis Review.
