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Dance

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                Inside a fleeting redemption;

subterranean stones stoning

in ice-minutes; tenderness splintered.

My brain has formed a different

diameter – better without love, without

incantations and unprofitable rituals.

My hands have hollowed out the kitchen, pillaging

spoons, pots and sponges. This is no

communion. Here, no priest can enter

these floors clothed. Self-pity received in

a little container – opened and disposed of

but returning in mouldy residues. My legs

are hard to lift, hard to remember to own them like

I do these hands.

                Things I pretended to be

are gone. Choices have failed to strengthen.

Faith is a ghost the light shines through,

cannot be articulated, has morphed into a caricature

of past ripenings. How I wish I could close my eyes,

release myself from the weight of being.

                I could ride a train, take it across the border.

I could be like the young woman who fell – was she

dancing on the bridge’s rail and forgot the distance? or

simply bloated on drugs and insanity’s youthful wake?

How strange that her asymmetrical face

and lithe beauty remain, so you think of her

as one of the fortunate – because of the fall,

because she fell while dancing, and you have forgotten how

to surrender. 

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Copyright © 2012 by Allison Grayhurst

amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst

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First published in “The Mind(less) Muse”

http://themindlessmuse.blogspot.ca/2013/04/three-poems-by-allison-grayhurst.html

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You can listen to the poem by clicking below:

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“Allison Grayhurst intertwines a potent spirituality throughout her work so that each poem is not simply a statement or observation, but a revelation that demands the reader’s personal involvement. Grayhurst’s poetic genius is profound and evident. Her voice is uniquely authentic, undeniable in its dignified vulnerability as it is in its significance,” Kyp Harness, singer/songwriter, author.

“Allison Grayhurst’s poems are like cathedrals witnessing and articulating in unflinching graphic detail the gritty angst and grief of life, while taking it to rare clarity, calm and comfort. Grayhurst’s work is haunting, majestic and cleansing, often leaving one breathless in the wake of its intelligence, hope, faith and love amidst the muck of life. Many of Allison Grayhurst’s poems are simply masterpieces. Grayhurst’s poetry is a lighthouse of intelligent honour… indeed, intelligence rips through her work like white water,” Taylor Jane Green, Registered Spiritual Psychotherapist and author.

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Book reviews of the River is Blind paperback:

“Throughout (The River is Blind), she (Allison Grayhurst) employs 
reiterated tropes of swallowing and being consumed, spatial fullness 
and emptiness, shut- in, caverns, chasms, cavities; angels, archangels, 
blasphemy, psalms; satiation or starved. With a conceit of unrequited sex as “my desire”, nocturnal emissions, awakening in the morning, the poet lives at capacity, uninhibited, dancing,” Anne Burke, poet, regional representative for Alberta on the League of Canadian Poets’ Council, and chair of the Feminist Caucus.

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“Allison’s poetic prose is insightful, enwrapping, illuminating and brutally truthful. It probes the nature of the human spirit, relationships, spirituality and God. It is sung as the clearest song is sung within a cathedral by choir. It is whispered as faintly as a heartbroken goodbye. It is alive with the life of a thousand birds in flight within the first glint of morning sun. It is as solemn as the sad-sung ballad of a noble death. Read at your peril. You will never look at this world in quite the same way again. Your eye will instinctively search the sky for eagles and scan the dark earth for the slightest movement of smallest ant, your heart will reach for tall mountains, bathe in the most intimate of passions and in the grain and grit of our earth. Such is Allison Grayhurst. Such is her poetry. THE RIVER IS BLIND is a must-read,”  Eric M. Vogt, poet and author.

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