What were you as a man Aristotle?
Bend the mind in fifteen different places
to pull out a particular, that
at the moment of capture,
shifts form and demands further
adaptation.
Summersault
through definitions, substances,
entities – modeling God
on unity, and evil on chaos.
What genius generates such a mind,
dilemmas purely in abstraction –
a voice swimming in a multi-layered
vortex of ideas and sophisticated vocabulary,
adept at defining, circulating, making movement,
unparalleled density in each paragraph,
in each line of unmatched cerebral dexterity?
So I found you and I don’t know how
to take you in, if I can, but your observations
of elemental spirituality are exciting, and each read
is a like long dive into a living coral reef-barrier –
colours alien, animals sublime – both prey and predators,
proficient in the art of survival, and the energy!
Take me in –
if what I thought would take a week,
takes months, and I sift through
your summits and grooves slowly, tasting
sugar, sour wine, touching
the tips of wings from the flight of many birds zipping
around my atmosphere at capacity – sometimes
as shadows, sometimes showing their bright plumage,
and those times I can glimpse, participate
in your singular reasoning, hear a man’s voice
labouring under metaphysical complexities
and bend my mind to the cyclone of your gospel,
spinning, upside down but in perfect order –
maker of an intellectual sermon,
thinker uncorrupted, unlike your mentor Plato was
with his didactic prejudices, with his what-fors
his where-fors – but you!
piecing out the divine,
making meals, ideals without rigidity,
chaptering out the primitive and the holy combined
with your plying, delving, ricocheting symphony
investigation.
Copyright © 2021 by Allison Grayhurst
amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst
.https://issuu.com/allisongrayhurst/docs/book_32_-ways_of_mercy_-_the_poetry_of_allison_gra
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Published in “Dumpster Fire Press and Voices from the Fire Anthology” April 2021
VOICES FROM THE FIRE: Allison Grayhurst
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Published in “Chicago Record Magazine” March 2021
https://magazine-record.blogspot.com/2021/03/consecrated-in-murky-limpid-place-you.html
https://magazine-record.blogspot.com/2021/03/
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You can listen to this poem by clicking the link below:
