L.R. Harvey Poetry

APPROACHING THE HEART Difficult to find a table in this crowded coffee shop,  one with a little elbow room  in a back corner where you can  detach yourself for a minute to watch  what’s going on with an eye  clear as a cool glass of water.  This place is the hot spot among varied clientele, and if the baristas  are a bit, well, eccentric ,  and the chatter a tad loud,  it’s an interesting crowd and the place has a pulse to it.  You’re here to discover who you are and what you want, which is a tall task of itself, an even bigger ask given that all the tables  are full and mid-conversation about nothing, save for a single chair  across from a face  that stirs in you a bubbling ache of remembrance,  like seeing a childhood friend for the first time in twenty years or hearing your own voice played back in a recording. He nods, inviting you to join him, and try as you might to look away the invitation stands, stares, like the homeless man at a red light. It's like he knows something.

DRAFTING A WILL AT 29, JUST IN CASE To the earth my bones.  Preferably in a big wicker basket,  but if they insist on a box  than a box of untreated wood  so as not to delay the exchange  of goods. Also to the earth  the many poems I reached down with dirt-filled fingernails and lifted from it to call my own. Forgive  this callus act of plagiarism.  To my daughters a deep furrow of skepticism towards anything  with chemicals, gears, or bloodless brains,  the courage—despite lacking the credentials—to open the hood and see what's making that clacking beneath, and a love of the following: baseball,  the apple trees we planted, the many trees we didn't plant, neighbors, all things slow and placed,  all things mysterious as the song quivering in the thin space between guitar strings, and anything else I'm missing which is good and real and too big to list out or tie down with even the entire three feet of unfolded cerebellum, which is another way of saying the wisdom to shrug t

SPARROW Rainfall, faint caw of possible predator, and you did the no-brainer,  making for the cracked window of the nearest shelter. You left them there—your brains—smeared on the glass, your smudged judgement the truest enemy, and your battered body fit snugly in the shallow hollow  of my shovel. If you’re wondering,  I laid you where I myself have been been laid low, again and again  when my sheds prove something less than  satisfactory: at the foot of the tree we abandoned in our panic, there to lie while the roots pry our ribs apart, devouring  our hearts until—in the course of slow and aching time—we rise as sunlight edging the leaves.

THE INHABITANTS There’s a cove in a creek  where the light doesn’t reach  the bottom, and in the woods behind someone’s house a grove  of hemlock trees, branches inter- locked. Just trust me,  and let’s leave them there,  unexplored. Or explore them, if you must, but outcomes are limited,  and increasingly grim.  Say you find them, the inhabitants, and never return to tell about it.  Your family will miss you at the dinner table, with not even the closure of a body to help trap the steam from your rapidly cooling plate. Or maybe you find them and return to tell about it,  but no one believes you, or cares.  History knows the type— it's a slow and agonizing descent into something akin to death. Speaking of slow and agonizing deaths,  what’s most likely is that  you don’t find anything out of—for lack of more original terms— the ordinary: some silt settled at the bottom, flash of small carp, light latticed like fingers to cradle the leaves on the forest floor, the inhabitants conditi

ENCASED Not an elephant seal in sight, and plenteous krill,  but still the penguins huddle in the back, facing the polar panorama as if even a single twitch would send the day-dream slipping off the ice-caps, crashing through the canvas and back in the enclosure. There’s a toddler, too,  at this exhibit, vaccinated  into eternal life and turtle-necked  against the chill.  When no one’s looking  he bangs on the glass  with his toy knight,  still brave enough to hope the transparency will shatter, or if he's not so lucky for such a one-and-done endeavor, t han maybe—at least — serve to negate his budding suspicion that all this is something less than the wild he feels swelling within, about to crash like an ice-cap.

BUILDING THE GREENHOUSE               "Adam Zagajewski" quote The neighbor swears on the existence of a foundation, just there, where the old shed stood.  And believe me, I want to believe  the neighbor, and am near- famished for a place  for something green  to grow in this slow-footed,  leap-year February, where just enough light tricks the eager into showing necks before cutting them short, but the ground thaws on it's own time, and the dull flat-head I'm digging with brings me down just enough to scrape against the conclusion that if a corner block  was once poured it now abides deep, very deep.

ROOFING A SHED IN MOONLIGHT is not something I do often, or ever, but with the coming weather  and the scattered pitter-patter  of mice who’ve nibbled holes  in the tarp, I’m up here  in the dark. Well, not quite  the dark: what's left of light strikes the full-moon of the nail-heads,  and if a bit dim, sure, it’s enough  to see what I’m swinging for.  And not quite my first time,  either, or any of ours— we spend much of our lives here,  spidering in the rafters  of the various shelters we construct  to hold whatever we hope to harbor from the rain.  A bit precarious, yes, but  there’s firm enough to balance on,  a dash of reflected light,  and if, come morning, it's all a bit tilted to the left,   it’s not like this is our permanent residence we're pounding together.

  WITH A START A hundred times at least— the coach calling my name  as I fumble frantically  to lace my cleats with inopposable  thumbs, and other variations  of the same: a rowdy class  I can’t quiet, misplaced keys as Gracie’s contractions rev their engine, lost lecture notes while the crowd leans in, expectant. But what frightens more me is how I jolt awake with a start, falling, not late for anything,  my wife and children asleep  in their beds, falling, falling, again and again, into believing that—thank God— now  I’m back in the driver's seat.

 HAVING EATEN OF THE FRUIT              — "confusion hath made his masterpiece." —Macduff, from Shakespeare's Macbeth . The ball floated up  like incense, an offering  to whichever god held up  the evening and off the gathering rain, but the two of you  eyed it like a strange fruit, mouths watering as you clamored mine, mine , convinced that you could field it better  than the setting sun  it reached for. A brief silence after the clamor and then the collision. We crowded around as Amorelli’s eyes rolled sickly in his head, trying to make sense of the fall, of right from left and wrong in this now topsy- turvy world. We led him stumbling  back to the bench, where there— as if to stamp that this was no longer the place we knew, and nothing would make straight sense anymore—our unofficial chaplain strung out a series of profanities,  not in his right mind  and re-minding us that we’re no better off, the order of things—at least here, beneath the stadium lights— unstitched