Lit-zine
JU
Now you are
Allison Grayhurst
I see differently
Allison Grayhurst is a full member of the League of Canadian Poets. She has over 400 poems published in more than 205 international journals and anthologies. Her book Somewhere Falling was published by Beach Holme Publishers in 1995. Since then she has published ten other books of poetry and four collections with Edge Unlimited Publishing. Prior to the publication of Somewhere Falling she had a poetry book published, Common Dream, and four chapbooks published by The Plowman. Her poetry chapbook The River is Blind was published by Ottawa publisher above/ground press December 2012. Her e-chapbook Surrogate Dharma is pending publication by Kind of a Hurricane Press, Barometric Pressures Author Series. She lives in Toronto with her family. She also sculpts, working with clay;
Were you the jealous seeker?
Always annihilating intimacy, but craving
a palpitating communion?
Were you stuck on magic and the stagnant
fallacy of control? Were you pinned to a savage terror,
hating everything that made you feel – trees, a follicle of hair,
the smell of summer approaching? Are you through with that now? Covered
as you are with deep eternal connection – limbs and kisses, words
and no fear behind what might be opened? Are you through
with the angel armour – the denial of touch, your
secret superiority? Are you on the balcony?
It is still a long way to the light.
People are mostly ghosts and you are always desperate,
full of instinct, shunning, and the comfort of solitude.
But you are through with make-belief, with yourself being
a rock of brilliant hues. You are through. You are accepting
all that stands here – love. trust. fierce truth – made again and again
by such brightness.
I see things differently,
like lyrics and shades,
differently than the cold pale mouth
of worry and intellectual revelation.
I feel things differently - what was empty, just background,
a faint perfume, is now sharp, suffocating,
expecting so much from my guarded solitude.
I walk differently, hesitating at the sound of birds,
watching lines in the clouds, a child angry with
her mother and the small cracks on the sidewalk stone.
I sleep differently as though I never do, remembering
each hour passing in the depth of daydreams not sleep dreams,
not resting, but rising, my breath, my flame, living
and musical.
I wake differently, never tired, but full of throbbing, heavy beating
and the spring is almost here, trapped
in ‘the-moment-before’, in the power of painted hair and earlobes
caressed and kissed.
I love differently, like I’ve never loved, demanding
the wind, the desert, a vigil of remarkable intensity. Love, lacking
dilemmas. Love, like a place to play, playing,
then laying flat out and waiting for
rain, a hand, or stars.