Through the Nights: Allan Briesmaster

I am blest being beside you through the nights.

Housed, fed. No pressing threat. No frivolous wishes.

And without any need to dream of you -

although you grace my dreams from time to time.

We might go on a travelling adventure,

to rediscover some far-different land

that welcomes us again at port and shore.

We celebrated in a sweet embrace there.

But being asleep together is itself

embrace - with its accompanying steady,

near- indiscernible hum of breaths (except

for patchy snoring both can tolerate) -

dissolved from daylight boundaries in this

warm, unimpeded, open-ended flow

while we enwrap within our mutual gift

that self-maintains its effortless repair. 

from Later Findings

Ekstasis Editions Canada, 2024

Later Findings is Allan’s tenth full-length poetry collection.

He lives inThornhill, Ontario with his wife Holly, a visual artist.  

New Book:"Later Findings" by Allan Briesmaster

A decade or two ago Allan and Steven Michael Berensky (RIP) edited the seminal anthology Crossing Lines: Poets Who Came to Canada in the Vietnam War Era.

Dear Friends,

 

I'm excited to be able to tell you that my copies of Later Findings, from Ekstasis Editions, were delivered yesterday.

 

Because many of you said good things about my previous book, Windfor, I'm hopeful this new one will be equally well received, even though there are differences in tone and subject matter.

 

Let me know if you are interested in getting a signed copy at the reduced price of $20. I'd like very much for you to have one.

 

All the best,

Allan

p.s. pls add $5 for postage

from the book:

That Lyrical Light

Sunlight at noon and midafternoon
Is prose. Only when slanting low
does the daystar bestow
cadence and song on changed air
for eyes that widen:

               making winter woods a slow
pageant of stripes of trunks -
their long blue shadows drawn
across that lavender coverlet,
the fadingly-lit, crusted snow;

              filling luminiscent cups
of purple and yellow crocuses
close to cold ground with overflow colour
soon after April dawn or toward
a tender palette of sundown;

              yellowing the wavy green
in summer leaves wind-shimmered
along the treetop crests that sigh
at coming twilight just before
full shade engulfs them;

             striking, once fog dissolves
from a late-September north lake,
the fringes of maple ruddy with
a year’s lost warmth. Down-glittering
on puffs of air to frosted grass.

Tansience and brevity gain
such lovely strange dilations,
that must forerun the all -
too-common dominance by
broad day and starless night.