L.R. Harvey Poetry

Home Alone Coming home she called to say  she took the girls and they’d be back  by six, time an unexpected gift  I didn’t know how best to use,  so read a bit on the porch  while the light last then closed  the book when it didn’t,  which it never does. These days dusk edges in earlier, always earlier, a tide lapping at our toes,  but if it's time for shutting down the piano doesn't know, and in this hollow no one’s here to call to mind how loud is decent to bang the blacks in defiance against the dark.

Out of Town Previewers On the day of the visit  Lookout took a page from Leah  and sheathed herself in a cotton shawl  that cloaked the telling curve  of her neck, the mountain hidden  beneath the mist. They were a curt cluster of pleasantries, wrapped in tight  nods and God is goods, trying on  halls and teachers like hats, sampling  the cafeteria’s shiniest cuisine,   then—having seen what was to be seen—leaving to make a decision  sure to alter their children’s  lives, the lives of their children's  children, the way we all must  take the test before we’ve studied and bear the consequences of all  we didn’t know, those many mountains that of a sudden show their faces bearing down over the baseball field.

Raised Bed “One sows and another reaps.” — John 4:37 A small space, but room enough  to cultivate the perennial  hope that there’s a place in the garden metaphor for a brown-thumbed  believer stalking the long rows  of the Lowes lumber aisle  to load his cart with cedar  planks, his work not quite trained  to climb the well-staked trellis  of sow, prune, and gather, but rather  just to cinch the rough-hewn  boards of his life together in a way that helps define the borders for someone else who doesn’t know  where to start but has some dirt  and wants to give new life a go.

My Brother's Garage Carpenter ants was his guess, the tell- tale pile of sawdust beneath the siding  what he cited. I came over with a pry bar and we knocked the wall, saw more fall  with every shake. This would take,  we knew, a more invasive tact. Prying back a 1x4 we saw more than we thought possible, but still no ants, so another  and another, sawdust pouring out  of each opening like a pent-up confession till our feet and the floor were covered  in carnage. Only later did we uncover someone had used the stuff to stuff the garage as a kind of cheap insulation. It was an odd revelation, part relief that nothing  was actively eating the house, part  confusion on what best to do now,  our spray bottle of solution sitting useless  as we sweltered in others’ shavings.

Draft Something precious has been ripped  from us. Something with a name  they can’t pronounce has been shuttled away  as it crossed the street in search  of citizenship with itself. We know this  because we were there. We drove the van  and pointed out the face we saw in the mirror. When we heard our voices speak their native tongues a nd could not understand, we condemned them with a kiss. S ometimes grief is clear, loud as a Coke can cracked  in a library. Other times it’s what disappears like the breeze-blown receipt for what we purchased,  and just when we most desperately need                                                   the return. 

Walker County Council Meeting, Nov. 6th After the point-man for the Brownsfield Grant  unearthed for us just how sick the soil  at Chickamauga’s Crystal Springs  Mill, the county commissioners still  saw fit to approve the Development  Committee’s request to take the rest  of the eighty-acre tract out back  of Lafayette’s Noble neighborhood  and rezone it as industrial turf;     more good jobs  was the blurb. To think that—on a Thursday night in November, air cucumber-crisp  and salted with moth-wing—you could take a thing so precious, so poisoned and fallowed flayed, and with three words cast your vote  to leech the venom deeper down.     I hate them.