While watching A Private Life (Vie privée), a quirky little French film starring Jodie Foster, I heard a line that made me pause the movie and write it down: “We don’t cover uncleaned wounds here.” Later, I wrote this poem.
At my oak worktable,
I turn the letter
face down.
A strip of cellophane
crosses the center fold,
yellow as weak tea.
Both ends curl
away from the paper,
exhausted and maybe
a little crabby with age.
I slide a thin blade
beneath the upper edge.
Three paper fibers rise.
I stop.
A damp brush
clouds the hardened glue.
The tape loosens
one millimeter at a time,
leaving a faint brown line.
Drabby yellow
and brown.
Not my aesthetic at all
but it reminds me
of a living room from the 1970s
I used to love.
Underneath,
the old tear opens
from the margin
through four lines of ink.
For several minutes,
the letter lies
in two pieces.
I turn both halves
face up.
Finally. Blue.
The letter begins
Dear Mother,
and is dated
January 18, 1945.
Somewhere in Belgium,
which is the Army’s name
for every place
it would rather not let
a mother imagine.
He starts with the weather—
no one is afraid
to hear about the weather.
Snow reaches
the tops of his boots.
Coffee freezes
in a cup.
He drinks quickly now
and writes that this
counts as a promotion
in his unit.
Then Eddie appears.
Yesterday a piece of the war
found Eddie below the knee.
One fold of wool
from his trousers
is wedged in the wound,
with enough mud
to make Belgium
smaller by one handful.
My great-uncle cuts
the cloth away
with the pocketknife
he keeps tied
to his belt.
He pours water
from his canteen
while Eddie calls him
every name
he learned in New Jersey.
When he runs out of names,
he grips my great-uncle’s sleeve
and asks him
to keep going.
The water carries out
brown wool,
a sliver of metal,
and finally
only water.
He opens his field dressing
and presses the white pad
over the place
where Eddie’s leg
begins again.
He sleeps now,
the letter says,
with one hand closed
around my sleeve.
Near the bottom,
my great-uncle adds:
I love you, Mother.
There. I wrote it.
Don’t carry on.
By sunset,
the softened glue
rests in amber crumbs
beside my wrist.
A narrow strip
of mulberry paper
holds the torn edges
fiber by fiber.
The handwriting
shows through.
Under the work lamp,
a thin white seam
runs through the sentence.
The ink enters
on one side
and continues
on the other.
—Iris Lennox
