L.R. Harvey Poetry

What Time Is It?  Now is rocks and sticks to buy a bit of bark, ache no rub can reach from burden no words can, long night of labor to greet in morning light the unbearable weight of cradled  air. Now is prophetic  patch of thinning hair, glob  stuck deep in the chest  or kernel wedged back  a ways between the wisdom teeth, slow wheeze of incessant scratch. Sure, now too  is honeysuckle drop, wild  blackberry thatch, but don't get it twisted: we're still under seige. Best eat the family dog  or bury it out back before they enter  as they please without a knock,  bring it back with a pill  and fill the official larder. Plenty of ways to be a martyr still. But thick, meaty laughter?  If it comes it comes after. 

New Fixture The saw is simpler to find  than the courage to cut  a hole in what's forever been shut. Then comes going blind in the downfall of dust. There is a point in all of this when even tender-toeing joists  in the muggy glow of a head- lamp is ground more sure than tracing back  the power source not pulling power  anymore, the shear power  to snip it for good. Drill the box into wood then twist in the new. All this for the same mess, the same living room, but to what lengths of what's coiled in us won't we go for an amber chance at belief in the glow of a different hue?

Re-homing What I remember is how in the name of being humane we used a live trap, lured him with a nutty bit  of something delicious where he feasted until his famine tripped the lever and clanged the cage. What I remember next is  the rage, how there in the back of my dad’s suburban he smashed back and forth in elemental tantrum till blood dripped  from the pulp of his nose and he lay panting on his side, unable to stand.  Back then I couldn't understand.  I can’t remember if he lived or died, just that flicker of something like star-fire in the  black hole of his eye. 

We Were Here Days flash and fall like sprinkler  drops, pop like soap bubbles on the sun-warmed hood of a car.  Come morning, dead bodies will line the bottom of a jar unless we let the lightning out.  Someone's daughter turns four tomorrow, and a sparrow cloud graduates  over the pine copse to leave us  grasping at the glimmer of what’s already flickering in further fields.  I believe some can do it, the kind of presence where all supposedly stills and the moment calls eternity its alibi,  but the closet I've come is this   sense that I can almost feel the picture developing, and on it the damning evidence of  thumbprints, matching ours.

[Untitled] The door opened on the opened neck  of a White Leghorn cracking a grin, fleshy as the raw wound of the world  for which some of us weep  and others head straight to the shed for the shovel. There is, of course, the work ahead: reinforce the coop, tie tight the chinks through which a paw  might reach, look for words that neither lie nor tell the lay of it   to children who want to know what happens  to more than birds. What there isn’t  is making sense of this, making right, just  the making, always the making, mess  by which we might yet meet  the warm press of fingers  folding us into ourselves and out  of ourselves into the fold  where we perch awhile, heads tucked like little lumps of clay waiting  for the light to take shape.

Marshlands I do not think my grandfather ever pressed an oyster shell into my palm,  with fingers callused from crab traps  wrapped my little ones into a fist  around it as we stood on his dock in the Beaufort River. I do not think  this ever occurred, though I can feel  the moment’s sharp edges, smell the pluff mud  my dad buried himself under as a kid  to scare Scott Dennis, thick stuff  beneath which his dad would gladly have been  buried despite his long-calcified love  for the Presbyterian fold. Truth  is always at stake, but what won’t we make to trace these tributaries we washed up from,  explain this chafing to make something  beautiful of the grain on our tongues?