L.R. Harvey Poetry

PLUMB No words for prayer tonight,  but who defines? for then it might be prayer to center the moon  between the power lines outside the bedroom window,  by means of which I hope to level out the world before  it tilts off the shelf and shatters.  First one eye then the other,  and it's no easy matter from this angle to ascertain the true as it ricochets between  the wires. And need I explain how it waxes, wanes,         we tire? 

TRANS PLANT The pellets start in peat-pots— this is in the vein of thought that says it’s best to start out converts with a part, and not where God converts his chosen crop to war machine,  razing foreign fields down even to the sprouts. Still,  terrified we dry them out most wilt   from overwatering, drowning  in intended care without a chance for air. Perhaps this is why the garden manuals advise early transplant, which is a term invoking less we let them go and more we decompose until we're naught but soil ourselves, and this the same soil into which they too—if they’re to live at all— must soon be swallowed, whole.

AFTER THE SPELL We were—till then—content within the fenced-in modern mind, though reason trod the tired rows troubled: why will nothing grow ? But then it brought us deeper in, past the fields to a pebbled shore beside a sea in which we washed  the world, returning—may we call it home, the land we briefly left behind like a dead skin?—to find it shine a bit more as itself. But rinsed,  what else but dry it out again— this one’s all we have to wear,  remember?—and how the hot air in our native country makes it shrink, insisting that it take a size or two, at best. Cleaner, yes,  if small now, and tighter in the chest.

AN OBSCURE POEM He sees the world beyond  our too-thin definitions of a world, of sight,  but then again he might  just be a pretentious prick and that’s the end of it.  I suppose it hinges on  if that’s a hand to pull us in or just a finger, pointing out  our consternation with a shout of Look! I’ve got them in a pretzel!   as we do our best to fill  the seething silences, wonder how it all fits together or whether there is no reason,  rhyme, no one back behind.

IN PLEASANT PLACES Oddly, and even in the midst of my frustration at this  mist of mine, these cloudy eyes will serve to clarify.  One loses their taste for numbering the stars  when they blur together like God, or at least our words for him. There is more than enough divinity here  before we look further, trying to peer over the edge, and if we learn to see it, maybe we needn't. Dew is the same water they've got up there.

SHELTER But Faust was not the first  to lament the limits of the best blueprints, the soundest studies  in architectural excellence, for keeping out the rain.  Before him were many a man  who on a sunny Summer day  would sit outside the gates— the open gates of the city— in the refined if quiet company  of dead minds who know  a thing or two of cities, how  they work. And then the thunderhead,  and for all his knowledge of cathedral roofs and how  they hold, his own now sogs,                       sags.

HOLLOW Her tea-cup fingers barely fit  around the rounded part of a play-set kitchen pear.  She lifts it into the air.  Having made me dinner, who would ever dare to pare it down and peer  beneath the plastic peel? Love converts the wishful to the real. Delicious . It’s all  there is to say. And when  I pray, might that be then received itself as the belief instead of what's beneath?

  NO GOD FOR MAN WITHOUT A WORLD Late day, a waft fulfills  its call to tell what isn’t full. Still,   the symbol more than hints at what's beyond— the symbol is the what’s beyond, if but in hints, a scent so strong  you taste the coming  feast. And this is part of eating, no?—as if we might appreciate the banquet with our noses stuffed.