L.R. Harvey Poetry

One Trail is Better Blazed 'Will it leave me the free play of Mind? I must insist on that, you know.'* What greater degradation to the seeking intellect  than mindless sheepery, gnawing in the beaten path  of former feet, nose down to catch the scent of predetermined certainty? A posture quite pathetic,  really, this adamant withholding of a probing glance from side to side, refusal to investigate,  if only momentarily, what nearby fields  may offer. Think, such hearty nourishment, and lying well available (and fresh ) for those who dare to look! Content instead to slop the remnants of regurgitated grass from yesterday—the pasture where the river prates dogmatically, the bushes shading lazy trout in afternoon assembly—  one surely must, in time, begin to hope that there  is more beyond the far horizon’s hill, must feel the ever-nagging pull to navigate wherever slopes are fresh. How liberating, feasting  grass untouched, untrodden by a multitude

A FURTHER SHORE A prospect even more unnerving than  the present storm itself (and what a storm it is,)  is the divisive rift between the wary captain  and his restless crew, a rift concerning the strip  of shore the helmsman glimpsed in peering through the flecking spray. This rift is but a problem of semantics, really,  as to the cautious captain " glimpse" is insufficient evidence to nav igate  a ship. The captain, hardened by the pitch and toss of maritime uncertainty,  has grown (if we can call it that)  to solely trust his calculating instruments  for ample proof of verity—he doubts all means of knowing other than  the cockpit's many gauges, though even these  he's wary of at times. "I've seen," he often claims, "enough salt- eaten skeletons aground to chase a mere mirage." But now his crew is desperate, past the point demanding sure success, and eager to attempt whatever course they deem imperative to reach a further shore— to

Still Small Voice It’s evening now, and fruitless is the task of repositioning along the mossy rock to sip a golden sliver the trees let slide.  Jealous ones, these evening leaves, but I  can understand their hoarding of the light— I too am here with thirsty hopes to find  a ray of sorts. What should we call it? It isn't quite sufficient to be categorized  as evidence , but still, the presence here is palpable.  Yes, perhaps its presence that I’m looking for, real  and thick as lichen, and this place is full of both. C linging to the sides of something greater than us, we organisms share a plight, (and yes, mine too  seems sometimes cold and silent.) Dependent so, I guess I’m here as much to listen for a voice as anything, a whisper even, just to put to rest suspicions of insanity. The pounding water tears the rocks like paper. Speak up! It’s difficult to h

Appetizers Parched and ravenous, yearning for             the sort of sustenance that’s altogether substantial, they meanwhile guzzle gasoline for lack            of what they really want: something with a kick,  of course, but filling. I too survive on nibbles day             to day, so I understand the desperate plea for meat around the bones—if only just            to slice a sliver off the thickest edge,    but slivers are all I have myself which complicates             the matter. It’s difficult to parcel out the inarticulate in parts to share. Have you ever tried to pin             the last tomato with a fork? Or then again,  perhaps a better image is cutting up a grape,            but with a plastic spoon—it slips, to say the least. Besides, emaciated in the inner part,             the clack of grating joints reverberates      in such a way that makes it difficult to think.             I too am yearning for an invitation to a feast.

The Closing Scene Utterly, I thought, with lots of closure,  the sort of terminus where all the ends converge together neatly tied. A meteor, perhaps, or just a cosmic resignation  from the heating source; maybe an anchorman who groans God Bless America while in  the background taxis scream and women sprint off frame. But as it tends to do, my thinking  on this has changed—experience, perhaps,  or lack thereof,                                       of such clean breaks.  A period is hard to find these days.  Instead, my current postulation is that  it all will fizzle, slow and anticlimactic,  like sophomore love or when the milk runs thin mid-pour. Likely it will feel like reaching the end of something promising—a poem,  say—and finding out this wasn't yet  the ending they'd imagined and so they left it as it is, incomplete and unraveled,  like most things worth their weight, but nonetheless  a source of present frustratio

Easter in Isolation                Easter Sunday, 2020 What better picture of the tangled state            of current things than this: A table set with resurrection china, April flowers             as the focal centerpiece, an empty corner for a little sister quarantined, alone,   on Missionary Ridge. When in  a single breath are intertwined (and inextricably) the sticky scent  of cinnamon rolls with respiratory virus, one has to question when, or maybe if ,  it all will filter out the way it should. It’s strange,  to put it lightly, these hymns of celebration pulsing from the throats of tombs enclosed with cotton swatches. Still, it must  be evidence of something worth our time—this manifesting forth, regardless of the lambent circumstance, a chanticleerian rejoicing, if with a twilight tinge.

Good Friday Fast              10 April 2020, 5:32pm Now less than 30 till the predetermined termination of an antiquated practice far more potent than the lurking scent  of her lasagna in the oven. It’s more  a cripple’s hope of realignment, really,  this driving impetus to self-deprive—  a sort of scheduled emptying of all  the sludge around the corners of  the tank. Ours are fickle ones,  these hollow spaces underneath the ribs.  I painted the downstairs bathroom,  rode my creaky bicycle around  the neighborhood, and prayed, of course, and yet in full transparency I have to say  I didn’t taste the rising sap of holiness I hoped to find. No, the only thing I know I felt is emptiness, a hollow yearning far more urgent th

If For a Moment, Clarity Then reemerging, bleary-eyed, from pages  of St. Augustine (or was it Tolkien?),  it feels like when your nostril whistles inexplicably and you can breathe again, or when the hazy film in Claritin ads is peeled away from corner down, and you are made aware that yes, in fact, that was your previous field of vision.  Emerging so, this place begins to make,  if but a little, sense. But Vita Beata ,   as Augustine called You, (or was  that Thomas in the Summa Theologica? ) it clearly fades away to anything but clarity, and with a dripping nose we ramble through this pollen field—  allergic, sure, but rambling nonetheless. 

An Adequate Image             " This moment of understanding, for which we’ve sighed.” - St. Augustine The poet, rifling through his files of experience with hopes to find an image adequate to crystallize the fluid verity, determines,  after years of fruitless scavenging, that he himself is what he’s looking for: the poet, searching desperately  to find the perfect image—more  for sanity than anything—and forced, at last, to come to terms that, like the shifting target, it will always dance around the mind's obscure periphery. And having seen himself as that  for which he’s sought, he writes,  not yet content at having fully held   the fraught totality, but satisfied that this is not his calling—content, like Augustine, to merely brush against it slightly .* * The Confessions , p. 264