L.R. Harvey Poetry

Do We Have a  Quorum?  Well we’re present—this hangnail of the living  contingent—and then  there’s the unaccounted for who came before quite likely peering in—for all  we know—through the wood-frame windows, eager to wipe a dust-hole  with their thumbs and watch the goings-on to see if we arrive at a kind  of consensus. So to answer your question,  yes. And speaking of questions, theirs are ours and we carry the weight of them in the damp manila folders of our lives, eager to take the stand: On behalf of all of us, then, Why does it cost so much? Are we,  on this end of the bench, being  heard? And then, in a word,  what are we going to do about it? 

THE DISASTER We will gather there, then,   on the fenced hill reserved for those of us who knew, who spent what little time was left shoring up   what we were pretty sure about   until it plasticized into the membership   card we carry now on our hips, beeping through the gate   to make the trip up the hill where we will pass around   a charcuterie board of facts and relish the view from such a height, nibbling around the edges until the cheese   tower’s collapse, the little olives   so meticulously tooth-picked   at the top plunking around our feet.  

SHORE STUFF Only the usual: bullfrog bellow, water-striders zipping tirelessly nowhere, on the tip of your finger green vomit of pinched grass- hopper. But then rustle, chestnut plunk like an eye-drop parting the algae crusted thick on the skygaze of the pond. Maybe it was you who threw it, maybe not— either way, the algae unsticks to render a peak of the blue- green beneath, scale-shimmer  of the legend who lives there  and the cool clarity of more  than amalgamated muck. Wishing,  like Peter, to keep the vision  unzipped, fend off a bit longer the suckering shut? Tell me about it. 

MAYBE Another way is to get a place with the question, share a living   room until the two of you grow  so comfortable in your towels and dinner silence that the long trip  becomes bearable in its lack  of back and forth. It may even turn out,  despite the clear, concise  directions you were hoping to hear from the passenger seat,   that this mute companionship  is as close to an answer  as you'll need to keep you from interstate despair  when a particularly flat stretch yawns between you and getting there. 

SCOOPING The gutters are blocked. I know this because they are my gutters; that,  and because the rain is dripping  on the kitchen table and not into  the rain barrel, funneled from there into the herbs. There is no sign  the deluge will relent, but in a week the barrel will be spent and the soil will not understand, thirsting Beneath these skies there is too much to do much but keep a few channels  clear to redirect what we can’t  collect and guide it to the fruiting  part. This is no art. The ladder’s  in the shed, galoshes waiting   to go by the mudroom door.  

SPRING Not the thick compost  of clichés about rebirth, even now breaking down for next season’s  rows; not the rattle of seed packets, baby rabbits clustered beneath a pallet, promises breaking between thorns,  one per berry; not even the firm flesh of the moon's peculiar moisture, softening of soil and the tight malaise of the frost that wilted the tender tips of our joy. No,  the other Spring, wild urge  which draws the farmer out to his porch  like a kid ducking beneath the swim rope to discover just how deep it is,  ancient hunger beginning to stretch its gills, uncoil beneath another pair of little feet, kicking.