L.R. Harvey Poetry

INTIMACY  The knee-wall of our knowing  will not retain him in  the yard. Our best translations— leather-bound —have too been  found incapable of navigating  the intricacies of his native tongue  to ears as obtusely tuned as ours. Unheld, unheard— how then might we know  this evasive God who is the longing which exists between one’s misdirected lust  for the neighbor’s wife and his  property? A great question, this, if one best pondered later, seeing as the kitchen will not clean itself.  Come. Hands deep in dishes, maybe the answer will come to us.

PLAYING A ROUND OF GOD Having analyzed the game  from all accessible angles, spent time  in navigating the periphery  before the plunge, I confess my confusion. The rules—as far as I can see— are near-illogical, reward with murky  visibility the eager peerer-in (however well-intentioned his inspection.) Pull up a chair for me, friends. Here, at the fraying end of my analysis, and more uncertain than when I first began, deal me in.

ADVENT, BOTTOM-9 In the long history of the game— unrelenting in its back & forth—in late innings and unseen by but an attentive few,  a sacrifice bunt was called. In lieu  of the hoped-for home-run, a bunt?  Surely a mistake but there it sat,  down in the dirt and unimpressive as expected. But clearly unexpected in that it caught them on their heels,  the victory careening home as we  pressed up against the fence, our hearts in our throats beating                                        get here, get here .

IN DESPERATE NEED OF THICKENING The printer whispers out its best rendition of the text.  It is the draft of a poem  I have written. The ink is thin,  seen only held beneath the light. My wife says we are out  of cartridges, shelved somewhere in a store from another  dimension. And did I mention  the steady evening rain?  This road of ours is a night-drive on bald  tires, fueled by an imagined poem so thick it rights itself  and dances off the page.

TOWARD THE KINGDOM It was at the forest’s edge he turned to ask about another path. He leaned  on his walking stick, suggesting  that a second look at the map may turn up a misinterpretation of the key.  It was—admittedly—suspiciously  simple in its one-word invective:  Follow . What followed were few definitive delineations of the way, blazes  largely left open to traveler exegesis,  sparse instruction regarding how  to navigate a bum knee or the may- flies which bite this time of year.  Hobbled and bitten, it was here  he turned around—at the forest’s edge—and as he predicted a second study did, in fact, unearth a swarm of various mis-readings, confirming their suspicions that they were crazy to abandon home to find—supposedly—  a kingdom. It was with this in mind  the troop began to fidget and disband. Soon there was just one—the hobbled                man—impaled on the barb of that one word.                                

THE KINGDOM Which is more frightening:  the borderless expanse delineating   there from here, or its sheer  proximity, our faces so smeared  with its paint we’re all but blinded to the art? It is, as advertised, at-hand, in -hand, and even— per St. Symeon— is the very hand , if none theless concurrently beyond the grasp of our gouty minds.  With such a far-ranging field of near-likenesses, what might we  then conclude of this kingdom, this child—prismatic as a poem— intimately known and endlessly opening?