L.R. Harvey Poetry

  THE MAD MATHEMATICIAN After factoring down the equation  to simplify what presents on  the surface as a complex problem,  we’ll scrape the lowest common  denominator which is oysters ,  class, just oysters, oysters, oysters. Huge oysters too big for human hands:  sky without street lights, a baby’s head emerging in a sliver of crescent moon,  the sudden and wordless yearning to peer behind the dark cloud.  Slick oysters that slip your grip if you squeeze too tight: three deer dew-stepping at dawn, a toddler in her highchair babbling the bright excitement, the musky scent of bacon and morning breath.  Hidden oysters, too, veiled beneath familiar mud, quietly waiting in the sludgy waters of your routine trudge around campus, my walk home, the freedom of a dropped backpack. We're dealing with the boundless here, remember! This means there are infinite center-points, and the answer we're after, then, is everywhere! Oysters, oysters, oysters, class!  This is all the problem asks,

BEHIND THE CURTAIN In the living room two PhD’s  parse out the finer points  of original sin and other perplexities  that have plagued the faithful for millenia.  Here I'd like to pause and point a finger at such low-hanging fruit as the over- educated imbecile, pen a pithy statement about living with mystery or the deaf discerning what rings true. Perhaps I'll even invoke Christ’s invocation  to become such as these little children, who would never be caught smashing the music box to see what makes it sing. 

A LEAK Sometimes the omens are perplexing.  Today the plumber was explaining how most of it's unseen, and this is why he gets most his calls after a bad DIY project "cause they don't know it’s all connected," when three hawks circled overhead,  slowly tightening like a wrench.  The air froze with a screech  like scraped metal, like heaven’s finger- nails on a trade-school chalkboard, and in the driveway something deep in the soul’s bowels burst. Suddenly  I’d have given anything to speak the language that knows how it works. 

KNOW WHAT I'M SAYIN'? but she said what are you getting at so I said  it's fresh, you know, like a de-beanie'd forehead while the ski-lodge croons Lenny Kravitz.  And she said no I mean like  what are you after , and I said  it's something sharp, like mint gum for a mouth-breather, laughter. She went  Luke what are you talking about and I said believe me baby I'm trying my best to come to terms as our daughter strut by, two-year tummy rind-tight  and held out like a melon balanced on the curved tray of her back,  babbling the thing that's escaped me  since the day I tried to find the words.

GUESS WHO? With little flicks they click face-down:  the bald one and the mustached man, the brown- eyed girl in the ermine cap,  an old chap caught with the pipe between his lips, smoke drawn upwards in pencil strokes. Try to guess who’s  next! This year I’ll age into another turn,  watch as the crowd continues to thin around the board's periphery until  the mathematical probability of a child,  a spouse, a sibling, rises considerably,  the cold finger left with only so many  to pick. It’s a game of suspense,  of waiting until you must say yes ,  and then a rush like tin-roof rain as the board flips and everyone stands again.

GROUND FLOOR 6th-grade history was peeling back                the smudged transparencies of mountains first, then rivers, and finally the black                dots showing crops of some dark-age civilization that believed in spirits and grew beans.                It was green paper, then, flat and unassuming as homework or our parent’s lives,                but at least we knew the end of things:  base layer at last! Then the bell rang                and we tumbled down the hall to science.  It was the geology unit, and we learned                the scientific definitions of various rocks  and sediments, how earthquakes work,                 but were given no name for the shudder that shook some unexplored part of us                as each slide pulled us deeper, deeper

ONE-SIDED CONVERSATION WITH A 16-MONTH OLD What you’ll come to discover, little walker, is what we all discover, little  by little. Yes, there’s little you can do  to run from the love that wants you. No,  closing your eyes won't save you  from being seen. It’s a slow  trek, this toddling realization  that being caught is the end of things,  that like it or not the great I’m  gonna get you is the final word.  You're drawing from the boundless here,  outside the lines of thought— it leaves us all blabbering a bit, coming to terms. Come sit with me on the bottom step, dangling your legs like the climb is over.  We're always beginning and already there.

ACROSS THE LIVING ROOM We walk together sometimes across the living room, not going  anywhere really but going  in unspoken agreement that it’s a long  afternoon when mom works late, so we might as well make  something of the time and walk  somewhere, her arms as trinket- heavy as my mind, neither made for holding  much with any kind of stability. She has a giraffe, an elephant, a bird, and I have words and ideas of how the world  works—we laugh at each other  as one slips out and then another.  Like prostrating pilgrims we stoop to recover our lost provisions at the sure  loss of another one, on and on until suddenly she stops as if realizing something, twists around and looks back at me, a step ahead, then drops her load and spins a series of twirls  like a bubble floating to the surface,  all light now.

WATCHING FIRST-GRADERS LINE UP FOR LUNCH And maybe it would break  your mother’s back, pop it like  a firecracker. In that case,  praise the careful steps of first- graders, the little skips and hops over tragedy, backs yet unbroken by mother or someone else who says they know how the world works. Pray it won't happen like it did  to many of us. We couldn’t bend low enough to see the gnomes  anymore, wouldn’t climb  high enough to talk to trees.   Some never recovered. They bustle around now, here and there with certain steps, breaking  backs who break their children back until the world lays itself out, unable to dance, like a long stretch of sidewalk                               and no chalk.  

  SPIRITUS VERTIGINIS — Isaiah 19:14 I believe in what brings clarity,  distrust the dizzying and they  who say that upside down is not.   In other words, if truth is not  a hand on the shoulder of someone with vertigo, I have my suspicions.  That said, I have my suspicions regarding my working definition  of clear. We drove into the country last week, left behind a clear city night. Getting out of the car  I almost fell. I'd have said I knew stars.

A STEP AHEAD In flamingo footies she shuffles   to my boots then steps inside. They are mud-caked from work, but she won't track the dirt around the house— they are too heavy and she knows it. Instead she sits on the heels, squatting like it's a stool  made just for her. When our Lord said  let the children come , some didn’t.  Out of earshot, maybe, or there already, sitting, at home in their parent’s shoes and delighting  in things too big for them.

NEW YEARS DAY Another year of dancing on the edge of death and language for what I know. What dancers know is to train their gaze after every turn to a fixed point as they pirouette. It staves off dizziness, the way  I find the ceiling fan when I wake in a sweat,  wondering where I am. It’s  a slow turn, this world, but quick enough for the untrained. My balance is off,  and everything is starting to spin.  Maybe this year—who knows?—I’ll fall in and find what I’m looking for,  the word fixed  at the center.