L.R. Harvey Poetry

THE ROAD BACK Even the dog can sense the difference,  drops back his ears and sniffs the air as we turn onto the street that takes us home. Asleep in the back seat and dozens of turns later, it’s this one that wakes a wordless expectation.  I don’t know how or why, but know  what it is to close my eyes until a slow  pull—different from the others— wakes me with a whimper. We’re getting closer. 

FINDING HOME The orientation of the house was difficult  to discern from such a small sampling of pictures, but there was something about it that made us sign the dotted line  without a second glance at interest rates or all we'd leave. When we move in  we’re bound to uncover high rates of misunderstanding, like what we imagined the back door is actually the front,  and the windows let in much more light than photos could convey, but we’ll confront our ignorance down the road. Right  now, let’s celebrate that we’re under contract on the home of our dreams, the one  that— this, at least, was clear—boasts a living room where there is space for everyone.

THE RECEIVER Not much can tune her hair  these days, so we aim it upwards like antenna. Wound tight and tilted,  they orbit the house like a satellite searching for a signal, and ad hoc  as they are they seem to work,  because some days, somewhere between her cooking on the kitchen set and reading a book upside down, I pick up  a transmission. It suddenly cuts  in, faint and with plenty of static but just clear enough to catch snippets of a song I can never name but know I’ve heard before. And then it goes as quickly as it came, and I’m left again with the silence to marvel at how now and then  these local receptors can intercept  a frequency from somewhere behind the stars. 

THE TRUMAN SHOW Truman keeps his secret hope— the one that there’s a bubble that will pop one day, and all the reflections sprinkle on his palm like dew on a well- manicured lawn—locked in his chest deep in the basement. He knows it’s fragile as his sanity, and liable to snap  like a ship’s mast if he brings it up  from the dark for one more person  to tell him to keep it light , especially someone he loves. Sometimes at night he stays awake,  piecing together fragments of a face  he can’t see clearly but can’t quite forget,  the one which will sail him to the edge of the world, become a door, and pull him through into darkness. The transmission cuts as someone mutters Jesus Christ ,  and Christof sighs then, having tried even false fathers to sedate his charge, reduced to nothing now that Truman is saved into becoming                                    another nobody.

THE BACK DOOR If one day you wake up to find your faith slipped out sometime during the night without even the decency of goodbye, and try as you might you can’t love God, you might try accepting that and spend it on children instead.  There’s a neighbor who says  she could use a dash of salt,  and a creepy man who sleeps outside, and a freshman in a college dorm,  and plenty of relatives. Look down to discover the excess on your hands now that you've stopped holding a lie, and then look down again to see the excess of fleshy hands that desperately need holding. Why waste  all that love looking up? And hey, one day you might find the whole issue a big misunderstanding, and it all boils down to the fact that God just looked different than you were taught to expect, and you were doing it all along, good and faithful servant.

BILINGUAL FUNERAL The service began in a language we knew,  followed by—as we knew well enough to expect—a pause, as the translator  looked for words for those in the church  who didn’t understand. At first they understood, and then the pause lengthened, and we began to fidget a bit in secondhand embarrassment.  And then the pause lengthened,  and some of us looked around  to reassure ourselves we weren’t alone  in our unspoken suspicion  that the one who claimed to know didn’t. And then the pause drew  itself out all the way to the end of our time. We shuffled out then in the long silence, to this day waiting to find out what it meant.