I have to share this lovely poem from Portia Elan up on iO Poetry called “After He Is Gone & Killed I Will Come To You.” A sliver:
Repetition in this has a sweet, metaphysical musicality; it reminds me of this, echoing parts building and building out into bigger and bigger worlds. This is a canticle, a full glass of dry wine, a crown of wedding braids in spring.
A person whispers, “Clouds are so terrifying.” And one responds, “Both in life and as a word in a poem, the cloud is the thing to keep at hand, to symbol that you’ll never know really what’ll happen, when it’ll come, yet with a little bit of rhythm, rolling it around in one’s hand can do so much good.”
Katie Byrum in her poems in iO has pulled it off perfectly, these glorious uses of the cloud, the moments they are captured within, the moments they capture and let out of themselves.
from [BEACH HOUSE}
Today there was a purple cloud wandering through the other weather. I pined
for this cloud, groping my way back home, retreating from the litter of dead
jellyfish, the small globes of their bodies, mottled like sealskin.
The synapses still firing and twitching a heartbeat. Hesitate to touch
but desire to feel the sleek back of a being all mind and arms
ungathering. And heartless. Shining the sky back to itself.
There’s thinking and then there’s meditating, you know this, the hop-to-it contemplating, like the sky doing what it wants with the clouds, the body doing what it must with the heart, the brain doing what it can’t but do with its thoughts and feelings and memories.
That’s where I lock into Chris Smith’s poems in issue 6 of iO Poetry, where I pull my grumpy hands out of my grumpy pockets, and applaud as I must, for these poems, which have worked through some BIG things, both metaphor and hunks of skin, biopsy and heart, these poems, which have moved me, reminded me so deeply, of what life does to our bodies.
from “Biopsy”
One day I will become an elemental property,
will, like gas, assume the shape of my container.
Excuse this sadness, it will soon enough vanish
like an airplane into the unstable sky.
Excuse this intelligence, it will always be ahead of itself,
will always have a skull.
WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!
io Poetry, $8 (includes shipping), 21 pages
If you love what we do here at Vouched, please consider showing your support by donating. We will love you forever.
.
