Morning Glory
.
Lost hideaway under the flesh
where birds of prey drink to the heart's
southward direction.
In liquid sleep a pocket is forming
of voices named in childhood years.
And from the beginning the miracle
sat on our shoulder like a butterfly,
though we never christened it as our own.
I am tossing back the weight of worldly waters
and things to be morally wounded for.
I give no more from the side of my mouth,
for the seductive shadow and the running crowd.
Plain as the path to heaven, I kiss the dread
and let it drift down sea. I open a room
where the light catches my breath.
I am breathing a morning glory.
.
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Copyright © 2002 by Allison Grayhurst
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Published in "Creative Talents Unleashed" August 2018
.
.
Feb 16, 2020
Feb 16, 2020 at 9:25 AM UTC
As We Walk
.
I spent an hour listening
to the grey and cooling sky, and the blackbirds
that gathered low.
We are but gestures sown
by particles of love, desire and greed.
Few are one tapestry, most are a bit of
all three.
There was a plague in my eyes
that has thinned my expectations, but
I am better.
Being in love this long is like a voyage
underwater, swarming with glorious and
dangerous beings.
You will always be the one to hatch my breath,
the catching flint when I am shipwrecked,
and the good thing I can hold up willingly to the light.
We have been shown there is no grave,
only the mourning. We have been shown
it is the aging in front of each other
that makes aging wonderful.
I no longer worry about what I am going to say
because there is you, with the scent of autumn
strong in your hair.
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Copyright © 2002 by Allison Grayhurst
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First published in "The Artistic Muse", 2012
Feb 16, 2020
Feb 16, 2020 at 9:15 AM UTC
The Ride
.
Again the stars were plucked
from her mind and the world below
leapt up and sponged her with its flame.
That summer she made a wish upon her chains
and walked the deserted farmyards.
The ravens followed her through the weeds
and heat, keeping up conversation. At night
she sang to the beating of the rain and stroked the head
of the dead bug in her pocket.
She was neither of the mountains nor of the desert.
She was calm as crazy sometimes gets, and the thunder
hissed out her name as the June's morning rays
danced her a sermon. She talked
to her shadow when the birds had gone,
and her fingernails were brittle as cracked ice.
On the seventeenth day her breath collapsed with
the rising sun as the cobwebs about her sparkled, stirred
by a sweetened wind.
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Copyright © 2002 by Allison Grayhurst
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First published in "Full of Crow" 2013
Feb 15, 2020
Feb 15, 2020 at 8:22 AM UTC
You Are
.
You are simple
like death is simple,
like death is unmistakable,
containing the most feverish and trying
of mysteries within
its boundless domain.
You are beautiful
like a cat is beautiful
silently sitting,
galactic in its sensual form,
giving with its gaze
substance to voice and blood.
You are fire-driven
like stars and like ***
in perpetual combustion,
with an inner pulse of endless
dance, dancing
in savage, mystical tides.
You are gentle
like a raindrop caught
in a lucky palm, gentle
like the shelter of a best friend's arms.
You are more than sun and bird and fox,
more than soil to my groundless heart.
All I bless and all I need,
I hold because of you.
No meaning nor madness
could replace the milk and breath
that you are.
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Copyright © 1998 by Allison Grayhurst
Feb 14, 2020
Feb 14, 2020 at 2:17 PM UTC
Pathway
.
The power
and the moon and the bride
ducking behind snow banks.
Weather, may I have you to own,
be reborn in the dead afternoon like
a hawk that circles the windless skies?
Sleep, with all the dreams and shapes of dreams
tucked in your mind like precious stones.
I carved you out of grain. I stalked your elusive
steps, looking for you at each corner. Down I went sliding
into open houses searching for your seed, but your seed was
a balloon I could not catch and my child-grip is short, as are
my obsessive desires. Too far down
is the raging river’s floor -
I am carried off. This time I will not panic,
but sink and imagine I am growing gills.
I will relax the burning
in my mind and enjoy the end and then give in
to the continuous flow.
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Copyright © 2010 by Allison Grayhurst
Published in "Abramelin" , 2012
Feb 13, 2020
Feb 13, 2020 at 11:14 AM UTC
It is not
.
the hole in the wall I fear
where ants crawl through
or the red tail in the wind
that keeps me here,
but it is the leaf over the grave stone
and the cat on the small hill
without a hope of going up any further
that helps me stretch my limbs
and appoint myself a possible beginning.
It is what I hold out for when
the seasonal scent comes near,
when I am not willing to endure
the effort. Then
I am failing
and always waiting for
the answer to arrive
in strange dosages
to arrive gentle to the touch,
however minuscule, arriving
however obscure.
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Copyright © 2008 by Allison Grayhurst
First published in "Gris-Gris" 2012
Feb 13, 2020
Feb 13, 2020 at 8:35 AM UTC
Because of course
.
you will go with summer
never knowing a remedy.
You will go beyond where you go
around the ninth and final life, ducking
in dark boxes to fade finally alone,
away from instinct and nurturing.
You will go into the natural earth,
and from there, my vision staggers and
cannot name, but caught
on the wind, in sensual shades
of forgiveness mighty & forever,
you will know a place unhindered by death.
You will hear the secret
your pale eyes
have always harboured.
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Copyright © 1997 by Allison Grayhurst
First published in the "Wascana Review", 1994
Feb 13, 2020
Feb 13, 2020 at 8:33 AM UTC
better
.
Strips of clouds,
pink-grey like a snail snatched
from its shell. So many days I waited, waiting
like that snail for permanent protection, waiting
as an activity to delve fully into.
Nirvana was coming. I saw it traced
on the dated sidewalk, etched on the curvy luster
of a raccoon’s still spine and in the devotion
of the rock dove waiting for its one decided love.
Nothing was ever enough to saturate my yearning.
Even for a moment, to remember a time before birth,
before the furious fluttering engine ulcerated
my stomach lining, or before my sanity became a soft noise,
fading. I could hear it like a basic desire I was forced
to forgo - *** unquenched - like that but even
more. Like a crinkled cloth left on the subway floor,
I waited - dry, malformed, avoided.
The basement air is grooming me for an alien awakening -
maybe fluorescent, possibly ordinary, but better than
this sitting, tipping sideways on a broken chair.
Salt lamp on, a little fireplace or miniscule sunshine shining,
crumbling between my fingers, waiting
no more, moving at last
to another corner.
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Copyright © 2012 by Allison Grayhurst
First published in "Dead Snakes" 2013
Feb 12, 2020
Feb 12, 2020 at 6:03 PM UTC
The Day Is Like
.
The day is like
the day before
the worm arrived
in a jar at my doorstep.
Before I took the worm in
and fed it lettuce leaves and fresh water.
Before I had something to care for,
when loneliness was the largest difficulty around
and isolation pounded beneath my lids like
a cancer.
The day is tick tock and as slow as waiting
for that needed call to arrive.
I collect the noises from outside
but have nowhere to put them. I open my mouth,
but my voice has gone underground.
The sun looks in on me, but evades my skin.
I don’t hold my breath. I let it in and out.
I let the day be a blank wall.
And sometimes a day like today is like
an empty room and this empty room
is a treasure.
Copyright © 2006 by Allison Grayhurst
First published in "The Buddhist Poetry Review" 2012
Feb 12, 2020
Feb 12, 2020 at 5:58 PM UTC
Walking and turning
from the days of cous cous
to days of anything can happen.
Once sealed in summer - the four of us
on this ride, flourishing
under a brutal sun.
With September flushing in, hurling our
backdrop out of site, I wish for
the world to be a fountain of easy flow
and the hard mast made of stone to lie
flat and serve to stabilize our stance.
I know these things are
like necessary money
that we have so little of - but grace
is our bread and we face the drumbeat
whole - holding one another as doors opening, closing
lose their meaning.
Allison Grayhurst
Apr 22, 2017
Apr 22, 2017 at 4:13 PM UTC