L.R. Harvey Poetry

moth + Friends I too find Jennifer Anniston pretty, which  is why I noticed when she grew a mole  between laugh tracks—                                    perhaps you thought that it’s  the one where Rachel sees a dermatol- ogist, or maybe nail-clip feathered wings  just need their rest. Regardless, you’re not the first to make this Columbian journey, navigating  in the night and washing up on shores unknown.    Science calls it phototaxis , transverse orientation , and other names that intellectualize your mysterious  affinity for late-night Georgia games,  the chipping cab light in my Silverado, the LED that pops like candy rocks  and bags your pebble corpses down below  its sticky shine.  But n obody fully knows  what makes you do it. Perhaps it’s simpler than  we like to make our things—(pink, brown, and white spiraled and labeled Neapolitan as if it’s something new)—               

Invocation of the Muse, kitchen sink Sing and soak me free. Scrape off the rice  that’s crusted thick along the bottom of  my skillet mind, and let the Dawn go slicing through this grease-thick pan to loose my pork-fat tongue. Wash milky words from corners long unscrubbed. Flip over the spoon  beneath my flow of thought and let me soak the world. 

1930's New Haven Westinghouse clock From mantle-top to unforgiving brick  and down the dust-thick basement steps it sunk  like bone, fossilized beneath a stack  of Reader’s Digest  deep in the house’s strata.  With feline curves the whisker second hand  arches its back to scrape the foggy glass,  warped by what it counts. The oak-wood stand  is coated yellow with years. T he door in the back  ajar, rust-red gears are interlocked  in arthritic prayer, and footsteps up above  are all that mark the rhythmic tock and tick  of time: another thing, like me, that breaks itself. - published in 21st Century Flow

Hrothgar at Night Crickets go still as headless corpses, stiffen  the night with silence —    Beside you, Wealtheow  breathes rhythmic breezes on your neck, but in  the gulping throat of Grendel’s night it sounds  to you like thirsty sighs. You’ve dug the divet  on the ceiling above your bed with sleepless stares,  encased your hall in dream-tossed sighs, but it  is not the roaming monster of the mere that haunts your sleep. I t's sludging through you now,  sinking its teeth in tired knees, clouding  your mind with its poison breath.  Last night, I found  my first grey hair — I dug a divet of my own.

Qu Pry it apart, the way you’re taught to do  with most good things—                                  poems, a cow’s eye, pairs  of polynomials—                      and watch it go  from sounds as round as the river-tumbled quartz you nestled in your palm last week as if  it were an egg,  to cold, metallic as  the cliq of girls who smack their gum and click  their red-nailed thumbs on qwerty keyboards.  Has  it ever occurred to you that people change  when separated?     Find someone, something— Let it glue itself to your right side, smooth down  your brittle front, round off your jagged edges.

untold Canterbury Tales He died before his quill could scratch                 the man  with veiny legs, his shorts hitched up above  the waist with a thrift-store braided belt, scanning  the menu like he doesn’t already know  he wants the avocado toast, no crust.  With him they laid to rest                the barista’s tale,  a yarn of caffeine loves that never last the afternoon, of steamy nights with girls  he’ll never meet, scanning across the counter wishing he were a stirring stick. He took  with him the story of the meter enforcer,  a moral sketch about power trips and sleek  grey Teslas with drivers who clearly cannot read— or maybe it was a pithy quip about  that pair of cargo shorts.     He left me free  to write them for my own. I’m lucky that  they chose to rest from pilgrimage at Starbucks,  sipping their mocha frappuccinos.

Telemachus has got me thinking: how can I plan my world in a sane  and thoughtful way?*   Try lying flat, shirtless,  on linoleum kitchen tile, and see the spin  of long-dead skin cells vortex in meaningless  tornadoes around the room.     Or, crack a piece of ice from the pimpled tray, then center it  (just right) beneath the coiled metal beak of the kitchen sink—                   with thumb and finger, twist  the left-hand knob and watch the creature drool  its hot saliva, burrowing inside as if it’s seeking something. Try drawing O’s  with thick-tipped pens— blue fatboy sharpies work best: observe the way they shrink like light-filled pupils,  collapse like weekend plans or Spring-break love.  If things are really bad, try Tylenol.  There are many ways to cope.  *Fagles, Robert: The Odyssey , p. 383, ll.260.

Protean dreams I.  a grape-red smile carved from cheek to cheek, and ashen splinters sunk deep beneath the calloused hand that grips the hilt — the fickle thud of life-blood pounding beneath your temples on beaches staining pink. II.  the spice of what you should not taste a salt  upon your lips, her smell  like honeyed wine upon the alter of  a deathless lust, her skin as soft as bed-silk that you never should have felt.  III.  clinging to scraps of what once had been, you float on top then plunge beneath  the clashing wills of what you cannot see, the sea a roaring voice you cannot understand murmering dark with rage.  --- Dawn’s rose-red fingers may not lull to sleep  the tempest of your soul — but hold him tight, Penelope: a month, perhaps  for years, and trust this too will sink beneath  the wine-dark sea of time.

across the wine-dark sea The final leg, Odysseus:  go plant  your oar in sea-forgotten soil, and when  the wheat goes rippling through the fields like distant  memories of her, turn one last time  toward rocky Ithaca.      Penelope  will meet you at the gate, white flower dusted  across her sea-green robe like ocean spray,  and smelling of yeast and hearth-smoke she will kiss  your stubbled cheek to tell you that you’re late  for dinner,    just like Circe would.          Outside,  a siren song of sea-breeze sings you back across the wine-dark sea, and you are left to cope without a mast or rope in sight.

Grendel grabs lunch at the Waffle House Who are you talking to, old man in the corner seat? Waving your arms to swat off flies we cannot see,  the diners shuffle past  and mothers pull close their sons as you go shooting the breeze  with empty swivel chairs— a napkin set in front of each— chatting about the dirt of government corruption; another thing we’ll never understand.

four scenes of the sacrament I. Thresh as you will, you will not separate the miller’s sweat  from out of the barley grains, dripped from bloody  calloused hands then mixed and baked in wafer  crisps now shingled on the silver plate in whole-wheat snakeskin scales.   II. Cover your ears,  but in the primal hollow of your brain take in the liquid sound of life-blood, dark  and crawling its gurgling way towards the light, spilling itself in puddles on the dirt  beside the heifer’s opened throat—taste it  in the back of yours, sipping from  the little plastic cup. III. Settle yourself back down in the wooden pew, but listen to  the chop, the chop, the crack of the metal head  that drives itself down deep into the oak, the fibers popping like the breaking of a lover’s straining heartstrings. IV. Receive the cup  from wrinkled hands and meet the tired eyes  that tell you of rebi