Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Sculptor” by Susan Ioannou, which first appeared in Poetry Pause in May 2020.

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Sculptor

By Susan Ioannou

for Anne Lazare-Mirvish, 1919-2013

This poem was inspired by Anne’s personal account of creating a bust of the late Lincoln Alexander, former Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, not long after his first wife had passed away. 

I do it with love. 

Fingers thickened with clay 

trace his sinewy hands 

—so beautiful— 

spreading into rest. 

Posed in her studio, 

this aged personage she sculpts 

is unfestooned with medals and ribbons, 

simply a kind, good man 

months widowed 

and jagged with grief. 

His high cheeks, muscled 

by decades of dignified smiles, 

bunch much thinner now. 

She’ll pare some fullness 

from his earlier sitting 

—but sparingly, for art must be 

not a bronzed surface 

but the resonance. 

She sculpts. 

His shoulders sink, 

and as the long-pooled darkness 

spills across his words, 

she halts her scalpel and snaps, 

So what? So what? 

Loneliness, she knows, 

can thicken drop by drop 

and choke the spirit down, 

an oil-soaked clump of feathers. 

He nods, half smiles. She probes. 

So hard she yearns to mould 

around this wired emptiness 

not the once-sleek figurehead 

but a fragile ruggedness 

that breathes. 

Going on, she scolds, 

takes little day-by-day braveries. 

Yet even as her fingers 

pinch and press raw clay, 

the wires’ layered emptiness 

gapes back 

—If you have the art . . . 

she hears her own darkness 

swooping in to hover, 

doubts spilling over . . . 

—So what? So what? he snaps, 

and she discovers 

her subject probes 

and shapes the sculptor too. 

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Copyright © Susan Ioannou

First appeared in Poetry Pause in May 2020.

Previously published online in Ygdrasil, then was published in Looking for Light and collected in The Dance Between: Poems About Women.

Susan Ioannou is a widely published writer of fiction, literary essays, and poetry. Recent collections include Poems on Geology, Metals, Minerals, and Mining: For the Love of Rocks (Opal Editions), Looking for Light (Hidden Brook Press), and The Dance Between: Poems About Women (Opal Editions).

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