L.R. Harvey Poetry

The Tinkerer Repents No one, likely, will ever see the fresh coat of white  on the back of the doghouse,   the part slid flush to the house and invisible unless you drop something important back there and slide it out, which no one, likely, will ever do. So I considered,  considering, not wasting the work of another hour on my knees for what’s behind and unseen, but man there's something to it, how deep the sleep that knows a future   that—if you ever need to re- arrange the garage—you can.

The Tinkerer: Biography           Beginning: 1990-something            Terminus: He'll get around to it Neither skilled nor unskilled. Not so much a lack  of love for things finished but an eye  for too much that needs finishing. He knows what he builds will not stay forever built, but does not find the hardware of that truth sufficient to hold  back his hammer. When he hears  the song sundered, the grammar  lilting left, his tune is troubled. He is deaf  enough both not to know what went awry  and to try. Regarding this and that,  here and there, the split hairs  of what and why, he does not find them irreparably sundered. Why not me? he often wonders. Sometimes he weeps when he works. Laughter, too.  The pointed rage of a dropped screw.  No one calls it craftsmanship but he gets by   with good. The further beyond  his means the need the more piercing ...

Heaven There's nothing wrong with "getting in," but if ours was a kinship with a ticket at the end, like I were the bouncer you flounced up to and flirted with, eyes flitting always over my shoulder into the inner  room of the exclusive night club,  I would not say I knew you, or we were friends. And if you were a bit more savvy,  for weeks or even years returning to ask me  about my family, tell me the latest of  yours, till you couldn't hide your boredom and tried to push in past me to receive your great reward, I would still not stamp you as one  of my own. For that I would need to be  the end of your waiting, my eyes  your flashing lights, my name in your mouth the only cup to carry you to the dawn.

  Wind-chimes To think I’ve lived     f or all this time with cataracts                 shaped like wind-chimes in both eyes.       That first, gifted pair were the surgeon’s       soft, melodious  fingers folding      back the cloud.  I see them       everywhere now.

Five Points Spur The intersection called Five Points Spur  was designed—as I imagine it— with a mind to manufacture the jolt  which comes of having looked death in its one working eye and scraped out just alive all by the time  you drop your kid off at school or make it to your hair appointment; designed, that is, to dig its heel into the fat rump  of a Tuesday to see if—with a jump— it’s still got some get-up- and-go.  I’d like to meet the guy who said  Here, Here, Here, There, Here, then disappeared into the pines or beneath the bracken hill to watch what happens when a few tilted stop signs and a fistful of chances to change course meet. Is he amazed at the matter, or even then was it in his knowing  that with a few false starts, the occasional  crunch, for the most part the most of us  will get where we’re going?

Night Build Not all that enlightening, the double-A beam of this dim head- lamp. Again the motion sensor on the shed, again unseen the wind or what snuffles along the wood- line. Somewhere in the yard  the dog reclines and snaps at shadow, canine-clack his only tell. Turned upwards, even heaven mutes itself. Not all that enlightening, this dim head- lamp, offering just enough to see the faint pencil mark  f or the cut that comes, and then, in the thick choke of dust  shot from the shoot of the miter saw, a ticket through another swirl and vortex where nothing is square. What matters we could never build or fix within our stare, but still it gathers on our lips and in our lungs; with every breathe the stars shift, the firmament responds.