Contributor’s Marginalia: Jacob Boyd responding to Gina Franco’s “Separation of the Part from the Whole”

Allow me to just name the parts getting separated here from their wholes: the deceased from their people, the leaves from their trees, the ice from the lake, reflections from the things being reflected (like the sun), shadows from the things with shadows cast (like the geese), the reflections themselves fracturing, the water being parted, but not the flock. The flock “takes flight as one/each time.”

It’s such an immersive, image-driven moment by a lake—the dog chasing the geese into the sky—it’s easy to forget this is an elegy. Or a pre-elegy. A meditation on where—if not how—to let go. The religious connotation of “flock” is not incidental. I’m not sure if the poem is an assertion of faith or a cool appraisal of it.

Then there are all the echoes in the poem: repeated words (“here,” “we,” “face,” “lake,” “blaze,” etc.) and more subtle assonances (the long run of long A sounds giving way to short I sounds and then long E sounds). Some poems make it easy to lose your grip on the rhetoric. The sound washes over you. Maybe you—like me—keep going back and rereading, forgetting even the beginning of the sentence you’re in, trying to get a handle on the thing. Or you plow forward and let it be forgotten. The movement of that forging ahead—the moving on—is one of poetry’s specialties. The artifice of line breaks combined with the insistence of sentences.

Gina Franco’s faith in the oneness of the poem—that the poem is more than eight sentences stitched together over twenty-seven lines—is a practiced faith. Easy, it says, at the end, three times. I wouldn’t trust a reader who takes those easies without apprehension. It’s not an easy poem. Faith’s not easy either.