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Voice
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When you talk it is not
a shimmering sensation or
a delicate fluttering of
nature’s delicate best. Days
are not here like you are –
an open sewer grate, a crushed
locust. They are smudged and flat
as a textureless dream.
Helmets worn. Grievers
with their now-permanent-grief etched
under their fleshy eyes, checkbones and chins.
I buy buttered pastries, leave them
by their doors. I hear your voice.
You are trying to reach me with an old painter’s words
of resignation and reluctant wisdom – words
I cannot make use of.
The dead evergreen in my front yard will not revive.
Like me, and these things I clung to, it must be replaced
with something of less substance, of more obvious beauty,
like a red rose bush, birdbath or sundial. Or,
I could leave it there, brown and dry – a monument
to what was once lush, gorgeously plump, once withstanding
winters, the heat of global-warming summers, green,
wondrous against my window.
I could walk faster than this, chat with the neighbours.
But I won’t. Because nothing is here but you, only,
and my feet can’t find the motivation to pick up pace.
You talk. My aura is a smog-filled season
where your sun’s rays barely seep through. Days
with stones in my stomach, rubbing against one another,
pressing their hard weight into places.
I have no drug to ease my longing. Will it be long? Years?
Will I make it through to the Fall?
Do you have more to say? Say it then, differently.
I can’t go on repeating,
where nothing shifts but these stones,
sharp-surfaced, blocking my intestinal tract, pressing
with each step, demanding acknowledgment, denied
release, a minimal hope
for redemption.
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Copyright © 2012 by Allison Grayhurst
amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst
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First published in “Wax Poetry and Art Magazine, Volume 3, Number 5”, June 2014
http://waxpoetryart.com/issues/0305/allisongrayhurst.html
http://waxpoetryart.com/issues/0305/allisongrayhurst_voice.html
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Click to access 20151023No_Raft_No_Ocean_by_Allison_Grayhurst.pdf
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http://scars.tv/cgi-bin/framesmain.pl?writers
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You can listen to the poem by clicking below:
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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,” Eric M. Vogt, poet and author.
Such sadness in the air, mute but electrically charged, surrounding the reader as he paces with you. Love your images. Those beautiful full trees of our lives that are lost and cannot be replaced, grown by years and tending of the soul. There are no proper ceremonies or markers to quite equal such memories. Or loved ones lost. 🙂
Eric, what beauty, depth and breadth
in your response – poetry in response to poetry. Thank you.
Reblogged this on The ObamaCrat™.
Oh, my god – this is incredible – Grayhurst’s observation and insight into life’s intricacies is stunning. The subleties and motivations and consequences she comprehends in her poems is remarkable:
“You are trying to reach me with an old painter’s words
of resignation and reluctant wisdom – words
I cannot make use of.”
I am there, next to that delicate dance of the breeze through tree leaves in that shimmering moment:
“a shimmering sensation or
a delicate fluttering of
nature’s delicate best”
I will come back and continue to comment on the rest of this poem.
I lived like this for years… I remember an acquaintance that I knew saw me from her car window as she drove by and later told me, “I saw you the other day, walking very … slowly. What were you doing?” she asked.
“Contemplating”, I answered. In this line Grayhurst helps me honour and understand more fully what I was doing… the “you” being spirit:
“I could walk faster than this, chat with the neighbours.
But I won’t. Because nothing is here but you, only,
and my feet can’t find the motivation to pick up pace.”
I will return again to continue commenting on this beautiful poem.
I had a talk yesterday where this is a brilliant description of exactly what I witnessed in the other person:
“You talk. My aura is a smog-filled season
where your sun’s rays barely seep through. Days
with stones in my stomach, rubbing against one another,
pressing their hard weight into places.”