L.R. Harvey Poetry

Backpack  The answer is the sum total  of mountains, maracas, and those ripe mangoes  a child laughs, smell of smoke  in a shirt and that mysterious flavor  Umami, best described  as asparagus. Plus everything else.  But the test has been misplaced, so—ever the students— we circle the fire  around and around, close  to the heat as we can bear,  wear all this knowing  with nowhere to put it down.

Path to the Fern Circle As so many times before the story led us  to the stack of stones we called a door, then down the steep descent  into the woods behind the house, leveling out at the fern circle,  that clearing where we usually found  whatever boon the story had sent us  looking for. But this time we soon  found the way choked with Joro spiders,   a non-native species with thick,  calculated webs, three-dimensional,  like air-cages built to snag  light itself. Ecologists say  the ecosystem will have to adapt,  but such integration takes years. So we could wait, or abandon  the place, or—though the only thing thicker is fear, and it sure won’t be fun— start killing them, one by one.    

The Wait The king’s been gone a time.  Of that there is no doubt.   Once again the pigs are out.  Once again we’ve killed the pigs  or slipped into their skin, plucked Laerte’s fruit  and called it anything but sin.  If we cram the apple in our mouths  will it keep the truth  from spilling out?     The king’s been gone a time.  The whisper’s that he’s dead.  But Eumaeus, Halitherses,  Eurycleia. There are a few, still,  doing what they always did.

The Great Divide There is a chair and a lamp  at the far end of the room.  Here   is the landing of the basement stairs. Under the overheads I stare, take stock of what’s   between—suitcase, yoga mat,  green dumbbells, 25's—then h it  the switch. Isn't this the way of it? With what our eyes can bear to carry of the old light we go feeling towards the new.  

Essay Model            — Unit 1: "Allegory of the Cave," The Truman Show , various selected texts. The prompt is something like “what’s really real?” Beneath and behind the shadows and actors, chains  and sirens and a guy going to work  again the way he always does,  what’s that light round the rim of things, glimmering like broken glass?    The challenge is to synthesize,  to take a jostling mass   of texts and see that “yes,  they don’t all look the same,  but here’s this one, central claim.”   They always turn it in round 9/11, a day that means to them the weather’s beginning to turn and maybe they’ll wear their hoodie to the game.  I was only seven, my mom, as she'd come to say, "reading history to you as history was made," and today we aren’t anywhere near  New York and gone by 25 years,  but phone records model  how to answer the prompt  directly, ...

Birthday Poem The real hammer and the real wrench to build with dad are still in the canvas bag, realisitcally a few years out. But the real tape  fits neatly in her hand, five years old  today, and the way it rolls out and snaps back is the real gift, with the princess watch that really works. Sixty Seventeen . Forty  Twelve. Eighteen Nine . From her room she calls the span of things, or maybe time,  both of which are very very real  but also small  and easily misplaced, like the real, heart-shaped  locket, which always, we tell her,  at the end of the day slips off  and goes back in the music box.