L.R. Harvey Poetry

[Untitled] What we have here this morning, a bright thumb once again opening the hardback of horizon , is a complex  text, the knotted kind with a pine- scented secret that will not bare its breast to any quick cut .  This is the lover who wants to be  wanted, who wants to see you sweat for it, the puzzle that solves you  as you tear up the house in long afternoons looking for the missing piece. “My piece I leave with you” we were told once as a box closed, felt the cool weight of a Rosetta Stone pressed into our palms; it was so flat we couldn't resist and skipped it a cross the water. The miracle is not an answer  or a clear bridge to the other side but how the ripples will not disappear,  how the stars refuse to quit dancing on the surface of our diminishment, the light bubbling and babbled but buoyant, not yet lost in translation.

New Lamp It's not that I like the old, have a penchant for plated gold and Chinese, painted porcelain. If God had to twist his arm at this angle  to reach beneath the shade and let there be  light, I’d mutter Jesus , collapse  on the couch, and make it all new, too . My fear is that given how things get a bit tangled here, and being young enough to assume this won't be our last lamp, old enough to know I won't remember it in a year or two, if we remove this pillar of the living  room who's to say we aren't also throwing away our daughter waiting in the bathtub for a towel, you with a paint trowel still wet in your hands and big plans to tackle the basement come spring? These foundations of ours are tilted things, the world we raised forever collapsing  like a Jenga game we rebuild in the light of a new piece. Even now the mums from your sister’s shower are wilting on the porch. I’ll put them out with the lamp, just hold my hand so at least I can pretend ...

[Untitled] I’m almost from here, but not  quite. And what I mean by that  lives always one street over  from what I write. I used to lie awake and ache  to know just how it would be to be  the guy the girl I want wants,  how he must feel full and finished,   like the meaty bite  of wood- smoke I still imagine poetry tastes like. The world is a window  and we've called ourselves over to see for ourselves, always arriving on the tail end of the fawn ducking the thicket, the porpoise pod going dark  to leave us gesturing in the general  direction of absence. Plenty of strangeness here, but what's not odd is how we wake in the night with foot cramps: Sinking,  toes forever flex for the firm of final things in the breath-taking  suck and swirl of all this almost.

In the Tinkerer’s Shed  Most every tool has a home  here, this tin-roofed tangle suspended somewhere between upended and just order enough to suspect  that someone knows what’s what.  Levels hang crooked from a peg- - board; a box of loose wrenches tightens down one corner of a toothless table saw ; leaned on the wall   and looking down from the loft  a constellation of scraps bear weighty thoughts of all they might one day mean.  What’s thicker than dust here  is a sturdy faith in tilted things  and the unshakeable duty of being born with shims on our wrists. What’s missed, like the one nut ne eded to take this rust and rattle and cinch it all right,  is a clear and terminal task.

All There Is Having slipped the loop of all there is  to say, the wild thing we were hoping to noose feels safe enough in the silence  to peer out from the brush pile  behind the house, nose searching for a scent. For years now it has  dispensed the crackers from our traps,  stepped nimbly over trigger plates cranked tight with all we’re taught, mocked each fresh attempt at a flightless  flock regardless how we've fortified  the coop, flinging down-feathers  like breadcrumbs for us to follow over the field, beyond the brambles.   For all we know, it's like as not tunneled beneath the foundation itself, making porous the packed clay of our permanence. We can name it,  but that is not its name. We can call it  our pet, but it will not come  when called. Is this, then, the end of all  our being here, to coexist in glimpses  and supposals, certain only that a hollow  so deep doesn't burrow itself, that to be...

Leaving City Limits On the special occasion that the words fit right, and amber light cloaks the elm the way a wedding dress becomes a kind of second skin; when August thins to September and the dew-point loosens  its corset till it’s possible to believe in breath again, with all the deep that it might  make; when, without a doubt, the words  fit so unbelievably right as to invite more  than our knees to quake, as if time shuffled  its feet and the callused heel of the world  snagged a loose thread in the tapestry  to show eternity’s stitch, a sparrow cloud curving like a comma on the evening’s page, brief  inhalation to prepare for what comes next—  it’s less the bump of pulling in, quiet  click of arrival as the motor stills,  and more the soft tread of footsteps   on a road again, that two-way blessing   of a horizon with a suggestive curve  we can make towards but isn’t yet         ...