Issue #1 Winter 2002
Just To Say
by Jonathan Fink
In the attic of
my great grandmother’s home,
searching for a mitt rumored by my mother
to have been owned by Satchel Paige, I find,
at the bottom of a cedar chest, buried
within the folds of a family quilt, a letter
from my great grandfather written the day
before the Marne, before a bullet found
its way to the pictures of his wife he kept
in the pocket closest to his heart. He wants
nothing more than to return home, envisions
the swelled curve of her belly. He has enclosed
a photograph of himself leaning against
a tree in an anonymous field, strands
of hair, black as pitch, cutting his brow.
He is smiling, rifle forgotten beside him,
the nuzzle of it poking from the grass.
He says, when they snapped the photo,
he was thinking of the first time he saw her,
how she was walking home from a country
church, her cotton sun dress just thin enough
to suggest the lines of her hips and thighs.
In his words, I hear the conviction of youth,
how President Wilson shook his hand
on a train in New York and promised
the triumph of a greater good. When scared,
he repeats their favorite Psalm, how
its words, like her memory, comfort him.
I close the letter, fold it exactly on its prior crease.
I have read too much already. I place it back
into the folds, seal the lid of the cedar chest
and descend. I hear them, even now.
© 2002 Jonathan Fink
Jonathan Fink teaches in the college of arts and sciences writing program at
Boston University. His recent poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in
Poetry, New England Review, and TriQuarterly, among others.