Jonathan Fink

Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing

Jonathan Fink received his BA from Trinity University and his MFA from Syracuse University where he was a Graduate University Fellow. His poems have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Southwest Review, among other publications. From 2003-2006 he was the Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University. He has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the St. Botolph Club Foundation and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He also received the 2006 Editors' Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review. In 2007, he was a lecturer in the Summer Literary Seminars program in St. Petersburg, Russia. At UWF, Jonathan Fink teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in creative writing, directs the Writers in the Gallery Reading Series and edits Panhandler.

Links to Poetry on the Web:

NEA

Slate

Subtropics

storySouth

New Haven Review of Books

Broadsided Press

The Southern Review 1

The Southern Review 2

The Southern Review 3

New Hampshire Review

Verse Daily

JAMA

Writing:

Body of Sorrow

I. Eye

How you alone discern the light from dark,
the presence of a circling bird, the lone
refraction of a reed, the shadow mark
of willows bared that lilt like finger bones.
The sunset and the dawn both pass to you.
The iris, in its constant motion, breathes.
When given to the night the pupil blooms.
Your finest veins, like cracks in china, weave.
Your labor is impartial, scant of dreams.
Beloveds in their final beds, the four
oak posts and linen sheets, must, dying, seem
at length to you, no less than all before.
How even lost in perfect dark you fill
to hold, within your brimming, constant will.

II. Ear

The tunnel of your hearing is the song.
The bones that rub like cricket wings to stir
the thinnest stretch of skin were anchored long
before their time when earth was dust conferred
by wind. Consider all the voices borne
within—the pitch of song released at birth,
the mother’s with her piercing trill that mourns
your passing into form, and your own worth
defined in turn by matching her true prayer
with cries. Though words can rise to you alone
and bind with meaning all that’s want or fair,
the burden of your sorrow’s single throne
is held within the weight that judgment brings—
a throttled, flightless bird that will not sing.

III. Nose

No keener hinge surrenders to the past.
When languid drift of sewer rot ascends
as fog from depths below to reach, at last,
the passing crowds, see how, en masse, they bend
in stride, their shoulders slumped and nostrils flared.
As memory rises, each to each, one man
recalls biology with students paired
and reaching in formaldehyde to hand
like surgeons back and forth the gleaming eyes
of pigs. A woman sleek in suit and heels
is given transport to the day that lies
unspoken in her now, her father, sealed
by stroke, at home. She shudders for his death
to come, the rising scent of acrid breath.

IV. Tongue

You are the regulator of the law
where thought is born of language first, unfurled
within the mind like bolts of silk. Because
of you, cathedrals rise to mark the curl
of saints entombed, undone in time by words
fallacious, lost. Though, pound for pound, your strength
persists (how soon the heart relents, unheard
within its cage) to claim dominion, length
by width, of all the muscle body owns.
Yet even in your power you are bound
to writhe within the mouth’s dark cave and hone,
as voice escapes on wind, all words from sound.
In prejudice you guard the body’s gate
as guide both forming and divining fate.

V. Skin

The body, in its sorrow, claims as gown
the labor of the past, both true and marred,
where constant hemming of its will is found
restored in time by blood, then scab, then scar.
As transport of release, all grief redeems
where limb will link with limb and water stir
to join with loss the ache that absence brings
and rise in making, form to form returned.
The touch of those we love is gift entire—
how fingers meet and, in their holding, weave,
as hair, to shoulder, falls as length of fire
and lips, in joining, soul to soul reprieve.
How given is the body’s start as seed
to burrow, root in darkness, and to feed.

--first printed in TriQuarterly