L.R. Harvey Poetry

  SUNDAY NIGHT I creak in the warped rocker out front while crickets cry louder than they should in mid-September, watching summer choke and the last ember warble in my pipe and thinking of Ecclesiastes, which I teach beginning tomorrow, so Lord, please teach me this,  how could smoke that smells this good be meaningless?

  TURNED AROUND At what I thought was Lowes to get  some grout to finish patching up a project I set out on overconfident, myself,  I ask the lady on what shelf they place it now because it’s moved from where I knew it was once.  For that brand she suggests I try  Lowes, misplacing her words, but I  can overlook that and the fact she has on  the wrong orange apron because we all get con- fused. Still, disorienting to find cracks in how it ought to be, and even more so how quick    we are to patch instead of turn around and face how naturally we call everything else misplaced.

REFLECTION In the movies someone stares intently into a tarnished mirror  or beside a body of water,  and someone else is always there  with them—a mentor with an old soul—to gently  stir them to look harder . Slowly something foreign materializes through  the familiar reflection, and we  are left to wonder if this is a trick of the light or a momentary pull-back of some veil or other. Pull back enough and even the well-trod grass of the back- yard begins to writhe with insect life, invisible without a down-shift of focus. So focus, and observe  how two questions begin to emerge, disrupting the face looking in like bubbles from the bottom:  Where else is life hiding, and who is here with us—just now—whispering, deeper

THE POET SETS UP HIS TRICK In this next act I will attempt to construct a door, which will—with any luck—conduct you through itself and myself and yourself  into the expanse beyond such selves as we incline ourselves to figure.  By doing so I will—go figure— erect as well a wall to hold this invitation into what is wall-less. Consider it a necessary hindrance to frame this summons to entrance , like the roof-lines on a mountain eclipsing our vision of the very horizon they envisioned. T he lights will flick back on, then, and if I have done my work you will flit out, blurry-eyed and wondering exactly where within to locate this nagging sense of how much you'd like another door to further illuminate how veiled we are.

MISSING: MODERN GOD So that's who we adopted then, found and repackaged with a cutesy name. Irresistible at first, the kind of attraction that slows traffic and levels women and old men to the same high-pitched plane.  Home in a box then, cause Lord , who could contain themselves? Short stint of bliss  like a honeymoon, then this and this and this too- soon held up in ribbons alongside any lingering suspicions of innocence. At the heels of maturation come tailing the nipping questions:  What to do with what we’ve claimed? Feed it, ditch it, or                                    look for where it came from? 

HEAD & HEART Mid-sentence they down-shift                a pitch, switch to Spanish when the road proves difficult                to navigate. In and out  seamlessly they slip,                 knowing that any trip  worth taking means a road                 that winds, climbs, means a road demanding many gears. I am all-English ears to hear                 them disappear around the bend of my one-lane sense of sense,                emerge again like lisps of light between  the bows. On this ascent                they’re laughing now,  as if they finally found                 what they were looking for, together get up—satisfied—to pay for                 their meal at one register I am hungry to acquire.