L.R. Harvey Poetry

Walker County Council Meeting, Nov. 6th After the point-man for the Brownsfield Grant  unearthed for us just how sick the soil  at Chickamauga’s Crystal Springs  Mill, the county commissioners still  saw fit to approve the Development  Committee’s request to take the rest  of the eighty-acre tract out back  of Lafayette’s Noble neighborhood  and rezone it as industrial turf;     more good jobs  was the blurb. To think that—on a Thursday night in November, air cucumber-crisp  and salted with moth-wing—you could take a thing so precious, so poisoned and fallowed flayed, and with three words cast your vote  to leech the venom deeper down.     I hate them. 

  Late Repair Brand faithful, life never waits  for the right time to change the brakes, the moon a Centric rotor  in a Pennzoil sky. Glint of light off a breaker bar, caliper compressed  somewhere in the yard, stripped bolt  and the engine’s heavy front end  daring we stick our head in its jaws and hope the jack-stand holds.  Rest? If such a thing exists it’s lubricated in the wet, raw promise of new skin not yet  on our knuckles; scrub as we will,  we’ll take the night with us  in our thumbprints. Cast off the old pads! Torque the wrench!  Cinch down these loose  wills and bleed the clogged line!  No one can give us a ride there come morning: we’re in this now and thundering so heavily toward light that it’s too late to stop.

A Few Branches Up the Magnolia Tree We weren’t afraid of him but of how  he’d peer over the porcelain, say “Clear  your plate, boy,” harsher than our own father would have said it, so we’d shove  our shoulders back but not our chairs.  Son of the Depression, he screwed the lids  on canned pears and how he really felt, ate the orange rinds and best dealt  love in shrimp, grits, and knowing,  at least, the names of the grandchildren  who crunched through the oyster-shell drive to where he sat on the wrap around porch overlooking the slow curve  of the Beaufort River, that strong arm  of water my dad says raised him when his was busy politicking among the crab traps.  What I best remember when we cleaned out the basement of Marshlands after the sailboat he whispered was coming  to pick him up had loaded its cargo  and disappeared behind the veil of Spanish moss, was a can of peaches,  twenty-years-old at least, bloated...

Repair For a mind wrapped in insulation  somewhere up in the attic, I sure looked  like I was listening, heard her well enough  from where she stood planted  at the sink, steam rising from the rinse as she explained her deepening sense  that love these days is coming down  to folded laundry, vacuumed rugs.  After dinner I left my plate  and laced my boots to clamber up  the hatch, descending only briefly  to tell her about the sharp pitch  of the roof where the truss needs  repair, how while I can see what needs  to happen, it’s like I’d have to shrink somehow, diminish myself, to actually get there.

Naming the Trees What Laertes seeded in his sorrow was—Homer makes exceedingly  clear—an orchard : ten apple and thirteen  pear, forty fig, some fifty vine  of grape. What I have planted in mine  does not deserve the term, the way  I balk when someone with a few laying birds talks about life on the farm. Still,  no one knew the wanderer—much less  the wanderer himself—for his fidelity  with words, but for how at his unlikely return  he walked the windfall, calling  each tree by name until his own  blossomed forth from Ithaka’s rocky soil.   So I suppose, orchard or no,  here I am, Father: Gala, Fuji, Bartlett Pear,  Poplar, Elm, Maple, Willowing Oak.  Take these windblown limbs; re-member me. 

At the Fire Pit A maple leaf floats unmoving  in a rain-diluted Mason jar of beer,  frozen in amber. You sat over there,  the blue camp chair cradling  a puddle in the divot you left.  Beneath twig ends and singed  flakes of bark the ash is a thick  gray paste. Not long back there was  flame here, heat, sweet scent  of pine-laced flannel. We watched  tree-thoughts flutter from limb to limb, knew the conversation  was too big for us and were fine  in the silence. Now, the brittle sticks leaned in a brittle teepee, even the possibility of such warmth demands more than all  of my paper, all of my breath.