Spread your Fullness

Spread your Fullness

Bust and be in the damp flame of dusk

where you tongue and blow the dark

all over the sky. Then the crows

waiting out the cold night on city branches

will take it in and weep your panic.

Gifts are embryos pumping, and doorways

working to keep order. You pour yourself into a bottle,

fixing your concentration on a loose particle

until it too grinds a motion, dispersing

through fast friction into emptiness.

Hollow in the cells where substance is

supposed to thrive but cannot multiply, hijacked

by an encroaching virus, miracles

are offered as gateways or a cleansing grace

that removes the dustcloud of consequences, miracles

as alabaster rays of divine yielding, freeing

hard fragments, trapped behind bone.

You always make it, over the toothpick cliffs

you gallop across, hacking off tight-throat grips,

shedding the layers of your debris.

You have outlived the keepers of contrast, kissed

the pavement into a sea, equal hush and hunt.

You do not accumulate.

There is a cavity under the earth’s crust,

where you build your broken nests, laugh like propagating

and beat again against the flags of your lineage,

like a vibration building power or

like a moist grain growing, gaining unseen.

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First published in “Sentinel Literary Quarterly” February 2016

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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.

“Grayhurst is a great Canadian poet. All of Allison Grayhurst’s poetry is original, sometimes startling, and more often than not, powerful. Anyone who loves modern poetry that does not follow the common path will find Grayhurst complex, insightful, and as good a poet as anyone writing in the world today. Grayhurst’s poetry volumes are highly, highly recommended,” Tom Davis, poet, novelist and educator.