L.R. Harvey Poetry

TILING The difference is in how you mix  the thin-set, which you want  anything but thin if you hope  your ceramics to set true, and yes, it’ll be a mess if you do. Nothing new:  in this perpetual do-it-yourself,  you’ve always had to choose  between leaving here covered  in the stuff or try to play it clean and trust your balance as the very ground begins to shift and crack beneath your feet.

  Eventually, given the firmament’s  odd proclivity for drifting further   and further apart, having a foot  firm in each world is sure to start  stretching taut the tender stuff, till soon enough you must either  pick one to ditch—though  which   is the question that got you here in the first place, spanning  the space— or learn to sit  more or less comfortably in a split,  neither here nor there but loosening your tendon-tight  conviction that it’s imperative to pick.

APPROXIMATE If you must insist to hammer the young with the imperative to pry up  like from their fumbling attempt  at a vernacular, fine, just keep in mind that you might inadvertently suggest—words are notorious for this— that our terms are for striking sure and true, cold steel with which we nail down the world once and for all, which is  totally, like, a lie, and has instilled     a long history of architects  with the confidence to set out and build more than a few brittle structures even now dusting down on our very heads.

WAKE UP, WAKE UP If a tree that ridiculously yellow  were to net the last light of October and reel it into the evening sky, leaving me gasping for breath as I flounder from the dream,  it would not be a question of if but what it might mean.  And if beneath that tree were a dead red-headed woodpecker beside  a yellow chickadee, any late-morning doubts that something was being said  would also be laid to rest.  And if this were to occur  on the southwest corner of my house during what passes as our waking, the leaves quaking gently as a dog’s paw  giving chase to the rabbit  from his warm corner of the couch,    I have to protest that it’s not really all that out there to suggest  that the message might yet be coming  from the other side of these tangled sheets,   in dogged pursuit of our coming-to  and shaking more than our shoulders. 

  REVEAL — “Lead me, and I will be behind you right away. And I will do my best to be as brave as I can be.” — Telemachus to Odysseus Even when you, the abused beggar, are denied the scraps  from a feast which is rightfully yours,  mocked by the ones I let through the door.  Even when your army consists of nothing more than a swineherd,  a shit-shoveler, an old maid made  aware by your scar, your bruised heel. Even as you string up the unfaithful  maids of which my inner hall reels,   slack mouths hanging open to revel in the dust of our lust.   Even when you fumigate  the place, burning away the loose laughter distorting every face. Yes, even when our doubts suggest  a test, and we request you move  what has always been rooted,  the peace yet uncut,                                         even then let me walk behind you still  as you name the trees in the garden  of your father, the ones given you   to come home for, re-plant like an oar, and taste us, your fruit.

MAKING SENSE In theory, you drag into the dappled light of the driveway all the many tools you’ve gathered over the years to build a life, sweep out the inner room,  then with a six-pack for a friend  begin a rational afternoon of  setting right. In theory there are  plenty of built-in hooks  and a label-maker, so all of it  should all but categorize itself  on the proper shelf, and in the future you’ll know exactly where to go  if you need to fix a leak or where to look  if a tire’s flat. And sure enough,  the big pieces click into place neatly  as fact, and it’s not until the porch  light flicks on that you remember  how things arrived at this state in the first place, the yard scattered with odd pieces of pipe, dusty  instruction manuals, a cardboard  box of fittings that doesn’t fit  this category or that, maybe  a baseball bat. Some things  reject a hook, and theories  categorically leave us hanging,  but w hat's loose may prove the stuff you need next week to hang a ceiling f