L.R. Harvey Poetry

PATER NOSTER Once more she tails him room to room like the stubborn tendrils of dream,  blue footie pajamas swishing behind boot fall. She is all straight lines and slow pivots, finding at each arrival  the empty space he left, faint smell of coffee breath as he clumps  into the kitchen to pack a lunch,  back to the bathroom to brush, brief touch  as he brushes past to swipe the couch  for keys. Still she follows  like a blind believer, slow  but determined to be picked up,  as if yesterday’s I love you wasn’t enough to carry her across another long afternoon of littleness. She totters along,  chasing a father who stays a step ahead,  busy providing for a child  who just wants to be held.

ANOTHER  LOST HARVEST A small and manageable field, fenced by pallets someone once milled and pressed to help haul a heavy load, since fallen beside a road where in early Spring  I found them, cut and roped them together  with chicken wire. This is my garden  border. A small one, but big enough  for green peppers, snap peas, squash,  the parsley plants I seeded in the windowsill over Winter. And big enough too for all  manner of weeds to send up shoots , pulling down whatever fruit might  have fleshed if I had spent the summer  doing more than staring skywards,  lamenting inherited limits, and flesh.

SOUNDS OF MORNING A diaper swish as she shifts positions, the creak of the crib.  The house too, stiff, decides it’s time  to readjust itself—under plaster a ceiling  joint pops, and my knees as I lumber from the bedroom. The dog’s nails patter on hardwood like raindrops, then stop as he sizes up the couch, jumps,  curls up with a little grunt to let me know he’s landed. Silence now. No voice dewing down to which I might reply with Samuel, Here I am , no quiet sense of presence on which I too might settle in with a contented sigh.  It's this I’m here for each morning, listening. Not to hear anything,  but to sit in the absence long enough  to convince myself a part of me is deaf. That way I can say, sorry, I didn't hear you, Lord, which I need to be true.

  TERRA FIRMA At certain times—this morning for instance— the sky inexplicably curves into the distance in an uninvited reminder that once again  that this is a planet and I’m not the only one unmoored and spinning through space.  I’ve found that the best escape is to breathe deeply and keep driving until I find some tree-cover to pull down the horizon and steady things.  The reeling dissipates and I matter again, and my kitchen renovation matters again,  and getting home to prepare my lesson plan  is something that means something.  What is man that you are mindful of him as he tries to stay between the lines, get somewhere other than despair or a lie?

SPIRITUS VERTIGINIS The body is the tongue for the mute  part of us, the part which knows it takes more than a three-inch slice of meat to speak the weight of what it knows. One night when I was twelve I inexplicably became  a prisoner to the upstairs bathroom,  bleeding and crying but unable to stop wiping  until absolutely certain I was clean. It never came, and then I was up and down  the stairs all night for months, certain I had left the sink on or the refrigerator open,  and it would be my fault whatever ruin  the morning revealed. And if Carmel were to die it was because I hadn't checked her bowl twelve times that night, and if I went to hell  it was because I hadn’t checked my soul  twelve times that the night, and then  a decade later how could I ask her to marry me when I couldn’t be certain what love was?  The doctors diagnosed it OCD as they were taught to, which I now see as their best articulation  of the body’s best articulation of a soul’s obsession  with a certaint