L.R. Harvey Poetry

Discontinuing the Penny Bordering absurd, just how many  miles the bluebird will traverse, back  and forth with a pine needle or a rogue  piece of lace, another cast-off thing  refusing quite to equate  like my father’s repeated returns to Home Depot to buy a miter saw and a project plank, a pint of blue paint, gallons of gas exhausted to spend what’s left  of a Thursday afternoon building  with my daughter an eight-inch house  stuck on a copper pole with a hole.  Despite our best attempts to balance  life’s many accounts, what do we make  of the fact that quite none of it seems to add up, the remainder hanging   around like loose pennies in a pocket? How lucky, one day, we will know ourselves to be, to have jingled a wilted while  in a world of such costly inefficiencies.

THE TREE We didn’t plant it, but ours was the roof it loomed over, so aggressively green and always branching in directions we didn't plan. We had thought ourselves fit to take up the sheers and shape it  to the space, but how quickly it got out  of hand, knuckling up against the house  and vining fingers over the fence to involve the neighbors. Even after we cut it down it wouldn’t  let us rest, its thick stretch of torso rerouting the road till we took a chain saw  to its trunk, an axe to the rounds, then burned till nothing was left untouched by the ash. Even now, in skins we washed till they shrunk too tight for us, the unbidden whiff of smoke occasionally makes our roots ache.

BLOCKHEADS The fear—as close as I can make it  out—is that the sculptor, having freed the face, will then proceed  to fall in love with the chisel  and the knife, nothing less than the secret method for mastering cheekbones, peculiar twist  of the wrist sure to render  the ripples of the hair  just so. The fear, as so, is fair  enough, if also a likely culprit  for the increasing mass kicking back  their chairs not to find better instruction but to crowd the studio  exit, taking to the streets in search of a pair of eyes that will return the gaze.

The Neighbor’s Parkinson’s Not the blessing you imagined, this inability to pinch a pen or fit a Philip's-head to the bit, but when everything we vise into our grip becomes, in time, a tool, some of us could use a dropped screw or two, quaking in the gold-plated glint of all we cannot seem to hold.

  Monday, After Easter We unpacked the truck from Spring Break  then loaded right back up to celebrate Easter Sunday and its brazen hope, as heavy  as the brooder box of chicks I unearthed from the basement and carried outside  after church to give them a first taste  of a light bright enough to shatter  their little heat lamp, their cooped-up  minds. That night I brought them back  inside, woke Monday before sunrise  to find one of them dead, crowned  with another’s warm shit on the cold angle  of its feathered head. I buried her  beneath the oak tree, then scraped together a lesson plan for a room  of students who—having just sampled Summer—slouch beneath the weight of just how far we are from that  sun-kissed self. Is this, then, the real gift  of these brief reprieves, not to lighten the load  but more keenly know the heaviness  of all we lack? Anyway, welcome back.   

Happiness Even before we knew the element was lighter than air, we were plenty aware  that something was not tied tight enough around our wrists. Is a brief dizziness,  a laughable lift in pitch, the ultimate  party trick before we drift once again into the deflated night? What we’re here for is certainly more solid, (right?), heavy even  as the stone which the graffiti’d textbook  avers will not fall faster from the tower  than any penny-sized pebble,  but which, for all that,  some invisible hand has sketched  leaving a dent  in the bedrock below,    something big  enough to make us  slam on the brakes  and look up,  and for once   not to watch something fly away.