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| Allison Grayhurst |
Drove Me Down
By your mercythe stone was thrown
that drove me down.
By your love
I catapulted
into the ditch,
and am still there.
By your freedom,
my faith was bound
and the rivers
outside
have soured.
By these things
my table was set and my ankles chained.
I see no way to be removed
but by your mercy
after the stone was thrown.
Pilgrimage
Eye to eyelike a phantom facing the sun,
I will face the actuality of maggots
and numb extremities. I will not
be secret or grip my soul in spiritually
adolescent platitudes that provide answers
without truth. I will be under the heat
that compresses my lungs and shrinks my skull,
half drugged with fatigue but not poaching
the mourning dove for a brief taste of satisfaction.
This day will not be my enemy. I will learn to climb trees.
I will learn to wait, high above ground,
wait for the release of my fears.
When I climb down, in the wild grass, for a moment
I will lie down, stretch, and then, continue on.
Our Love
The salted lips,the husky sea and the atonement
of death, I called you my tale
of the bull horn and familiar voice.
Crack through the corn cobs, through
the years that seem to spell-up without
answers or digestion. But you and I,
by heaven’s chapel and heaven’s cattle
left to graze, unkilled, we are sparrows
after a summer rain, blind still, but finding
shape in our children, and in and by the doorways
we have and have not conquered. We are
the mantle where crystals breathe their energy, and
we are the same as twenty years ago, having only
each other in this place of senseless oblivion, having
what others always long for, rich together
and forever as midnight.
