L.R. Harvey Poetry

Public Record The county council is not unlike the telephone company: service  is spotty, but it’s all you get  around here. 15 years back now they cut 27 through the frayed fringe of the battlefield, opening Chattanooga  Valley, Rossville, Chickamauga,  Rock Spring, and Lafayette like an ulcer  to invite flow in and out, drowned  the residents in taxes to make up  a few lanes of deficit, and found instead  a string of withered Georgia towns  dangling like drought peaches  from an asphalt stem. Still, every first Thursday a handful  of residents gather to say what matters to them, staking their hopes  and grievances like plot lines in the plat map clarifying what isn't   our lives. Faced now with the question  of how both to be and go  somewhere, Jim Pope points  during public comment to the example  of the old Concord Road they want to shut down due to the invisibility of what's ahead. “Can’t go fast. ...

Visitor Word has grazed among the deer that July at last has sheared the split ends of the crabapple next to the trampoline,  and in lean packs of three or four they come like ghosts to make amends for long weeks of this heat. Tonight, though, just one  comes doeing from the federal protection  of the battlefield, moving between blink of lightning bug in steps light as bird-thought or the right synonym  for “holy.” Hush: this is the closest we’ll get on our side of the screened-in  porch to the word that means the musk of being here, that phantom tick itching us  mad enough to jump our apportioned pasture for the chance at that sour-sweet crunch. 

Contentment Not all that hard, really, given you  never leave the house or happen to know anyone who talks about things they do.  So long as you never chance to look  out the window or look in  a mirror or pick up a book  other than the memoir you’ll self- publish when you get around to it,  you’ll be fine, assuming you’re never mailed the neighbor’s utility bill or see the neighbor through a chink in the fence or of an evening watch the geese vanish over the pine copse  in silent confirmation that other places  exist. None of that relentless repentance  shit, sheer grit that living takes and dying too, unless you’re one of those children of men who can’t seem to find a world to call their own.

Trellised The best yield the garden bore was before  we soiled it with seed, before the natives  became weeds because we didn't plant them  there and the fence was yet stacked  in lumber racks at the hardware store  with a chance still at perfectly plumb.  Our significant others, too, kept their figures  firm as a fresh cucumber twenty years  into our marriages before we met  them, their priorities in prim rows  well-tilled and running parallel to our own.  The summers were never oppressively  hot, the spouses were, and the houses rarely  needed repair, till we—our very real  bodies with their very real hungers tiptoeing for the glint of it all at the top  of the trellis—found the cardinal’s nest among the beans, the rotten egg.

World Straddling TDOT is expanding the I-24/75 split from Chattanooga to Atlanta, an extra lane  each way, and Gracie and I too tax ourselves of an afternoon constructing possible directions we could merge  to ease our daily commute through the world. We love our rural plot this side of the state line, but there are times  we’d be happy to exchange some hey deer  for hey there’s as neighbors nose by  with strollers, chatting loose and free  as all the free money Tennessee is rolling out  to attend private school, like the one  at which I teach and where our kids  will likely be. But then, of course,  there’s the peach trees we planted beginning to bear, Emmie’s excitement  to begin preschool at the First Baptist Church we don’t attend but would gladly be dunked in the honey dripping from that twang, and then—that troubling pit in the middle— the question of why we can't be comfortable in the dragging afternoon silence of ourselves....

Palm to Pay Deemed nigh neanderthal to dig  into a purse or pocket for the plastic long since replacing the paper so clumsy to unclamp and then—by all  accounts—to count , now the red line reads like an oracle the pathways   of our palms, foretelling not a future but a number unlocking the numbers to our name. We file through  with our bags all the same, each feigning awe at this newest audacity, like so  many deferring fathers who never dared a word  to the boy in the house whispering  words to his daughter, but who were certain, come Monday, to big-mouth about the sheer disrespect of stepping into the living room  to find that tousled head canoodling with his princess on the lazy  chair, bare feet kicked up on the table which didn't feel the need to jump a bit at being caught in the act of defiling his very flesh.