…

Escaping on the brook’s bank,

banking on nesting warm through

winter, but tears are horns that open

soft spaces, and autumn shifts heat and any hopes

for renewal. Love is fire –

from where it goes there are no shields to block

its scorching. Can we reach bottom in the rain?

Sing hosanna at the mountain’s base?

Becoming is the stone, the house, the wave.

The lines between us all are solid, no longer lines but

one heavy blanket of vibrancy, creaking, splitting.

I walk like I walk – barrel beatings,

borrowing crisp notions into my ears.

Stretched for a while to be compact again,

I hear an approaching intrusion, a high

wake, strong enough to travel on.

Stronger days of running through the weeded grass

where rabbits stand still at my passing

and insects move quickly into the shade.

Stranger days of watching a patio stone broken

from a storm – from a fallen tree that fell,

leaving me to find

meaning in such drastic weather.

.

.

Copyright © by Allison Grayhurst 2014

amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst

.

.

First published in “The Muse – An International Journal of Poetry” Volume 4, Number 1, June Issue 2014

http://themuse.webs.com/June%202014/muse%20june%2014.pdf

http://themuse.webs.com/latestissues.htm

.

Published in “Art Villa” December 2015

Read the whole poem here:

Walkways – the poem

.

You can listen to the poem below:

….

Paved paths, brisk

storm of senses, an old

opening, endless as a dug-in arrow –

head in the weeping jungle, the coolness

of autumn air brushing tombstones,

the thin necks of geese.

So much night in a single glass, body

and name together, replacing

existence with this inheritance and no other.

Rows of ships crowding the edge of the lake –

docked and bearing down for winter. The distance

grinds, gravel on my belly, cracked shells

in subterranean pages writing down dawns and victories

never experienced, only imagined.

Is it right to receive the bitter strawberry?

Drink its flesh like juice and

kneel before reality’s dictatorship?

Is it clarity? Or forgetting?

.

.

Copyright © by Allison Grayhurst 2014

amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst

.

.

First published in “The Muse – An International Journal of Poetry” Volume 4, Number 1, June Issue 2014

http://themuse.webs.com/June%202014/muse%20june%2014.pdf

http://themuse.webs.com/latestissues.htm

.

Published in “Art Villa” December 2015

Read the whole poem here:

Walkways – the poem

.

You can listen to the poem below: