L.R. Harvey Poetry

AFTER KILLING YOUR BROTHER The crux of the matter is what to do  with the body now fallen so undeservedly  at your hands. Prudence says dismember  it, scrubbing beneath your finger- nails to rinse away any condemning  evidence of having been at the scene of the slaughter, then bury the ax.  Or maybe you play it cool, act  like it’s nothing new to hold a carcass in your fingertips, like really this  is something you do on a weekly basis,  nonchalant as a Sunday stroll. Of course,  you wouldn’t be here in the first place  if you were one to listen to prudence,  so disregard this. You’re holding the flesh and blood of another. This is no time for prudence.  Pray for forgiveness and devour it,  wiping first one cheek, then the other.  

KNOW-LEDGE Metric crunch of boot-fall  as we leave the trail,  brush past branches bent to snag our shirt- tails like an extra syllable.  Hands out to feel the pulse of lightning bugs suspended on cicada-song which is the sound of the invisible  vowel, there is the stumble of feet, the inarticulate  mumble, and then for a moment the sizzle-silence. The edge is the end of our words.  If for a minute, let us  peer over into the darkness before the dizziness, the recall that ours is the lantern and the trail home.

SELF-BUILDING Here is a heap of scrap wood, left like a crumbled map of the builder’s attempt to raise a self- made structure sound enough to keep the chaos out. With the materials available to him—pallets behind the local feed & seed—the builder did his best  to get it off the ground. What's left is baptized in kerosene, christened with a match, and burned. The builder steps back to watch an odd assortment of light shards rise skywards on twisting pillars of ash.  Rejoice, builder: In both the building and  the burning, then, ascent.

  THOUGHTS, ISOLATED The deer know when the apples are big enough to taste, dew-step  from the thicket to crane their necks and crunch. Dragon- flies crease the air on unseen lines, folding the evening into an origami crane. The chickens let themselves into the coop  at dusk. One day I hope to hear just such a simple summons, distant but clear as a dinner bell ringing it’s time to come home,  child, the meal is waiting. 

LEAVING CIRCE’S ISLAND “you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean” — C.P. Cavafy.  When you return home to a moist puff of dog breath as you walk through the door  because the AC coils are frozen over and water is seeping beneath the unit and the laminate floor of the basement, you remember that what you’ve so carefully crafted to hold the pearl of great price is fragile as the crushed oyster shells you scatter to the chickens.  As you pack your bags with a dose of humility to crash at the in-laws until they can “get a guy over there,” which, by the tone of his voice  is not, to them, a matter of consequence deserving a sense of urgency, you remember to pack a carton of cherry tomatoes from your garden as a kind of thank you for the inconvenience, only to recall  from their nibbled, shriveled skins  that these are far from what you  envisioned as the treasure of the field you seeded in Spring. As you throw them  away with a huff and hit the road, engine light on and mail

LET’S CALL IT HOME It begins by getting up and leaving the evening’s habitual affairs, scraping back your chair from the kitchen table and your plate into the garbage pale,  packing only cupped palms and an empty  Mason jar to chase the lightning  bug that flashed across the field.  What you’ve begun is at last the beginning,  when looking up you discover yourself tangled in a thatch of blackberry bushes enclosing you in a wild, overgrown  embrace, skin traced by the thorns.  From this ridge you can see the dim  illumination you once called home.  From here you can look back over the field—still holding the empty Mason jar— to see how far this faithful,  inconclusive following has led you

 A HANDFUL OF TAKEAWAYS FROM BLACKBERRY PICKING The best ones grow between your property line and the neighbor’s.  They’ll shrivel while you worry about how awkward  it would be if they found you picking them tomorrow and asked what you were up to.  Tomorrow will take care of itself. Love thy neighbor.  Pick them, make jam,  and give them a jar.  Oh, and don’t expect to leave with fruit if you don’t give some skin, a shirt-sleeve, a little blood.