L.R. Harvey Poetry

  Wind-chimes To think I’ve lived     f or all this time with cataracts                 shaped like wind-chimes in both eyes.       That first, gifted pair were the surgeon’s       soft, melodious  fingers folding      back the cloud.  I see them       everywhere now.

Five Points Spur The intersection called Five Points Spur  was designed—as I imagine it— with a mind to manufacture the jolt  which comes of having looked death in its one working eye and scraped out just alive all by the time  you drop your kid off at school or make it to your hair appointment; designed, that is, to dig its heel into the fat rump  of a Tuesday to see if—with a jump— it’s still got some get-up- and-go.  I’d like to meet the guy who said  Here, Here, Here, There, Here, then disappeared into the pines or the beneath bracken hill to watch what happens when a few tilted stop signs and a fistful of chances to change course meet. Is he amazed at the matter, or even then was it in his knowing  that with a few false starts, the occasional  crunch, for the most part the most of us  will get where we’re going?

Night Build Not all that enlightening, the double-A beam of this dim head- lamp. Again the motion sensor on the shed, again unseen the wind or what snuffles along the wood- line. Somewhere in the yard  the dog reclines and snaps at shadow, canine-clack his only tell. Turned upwards, even heaven mutes itself. Not all that enlightening, this dim head- lamp, offering just enough to see the faint pencil mark  f or the next cut, and then, in the thick choke of dust  shot from the shoot of the miter saw, a ticket to another cosmos  of swirl and vortex where nothing is square. What matters we could never build or fix within our stare, but still it gathers on our lips and in our lungs; with every breathe the stars shift, the firmament responds.

  Understanding Your Old Man  — for Emerson, Eden, and Shiloh It's all held together, of course,   but loosely as an infant’s head  held. Sometimes, when the horizon  is wet and heavy with towels  and fat vowels of sweaters, the black comma of socks, a breeze  unlocks the light fabric of the blue  fishing shirt, which lifts open  like a gate that I duck through  into the world so poorly hidden right there on the other end  of a laundry line. And sometimes,    dragging across the evening over the trampoline a stitch of geese so long a pine could snag it like a suture,  and if it did the tender, orange flesh  of Tuesday would surely open, dumping its intestines on our heads  till we were good and sloppy  with God. At the old place we peeled up the laminate  and found hardwood. Since then  I give it my all to hang on  to hangnails and shuffle slow, drag fingers through the dirt...

Pursuit I grieve the way my dog relieves  himself after nipping half a rotisserie  from the counter: not a clean pinch or pile but scooted across the yard  in smatterings and smears  that double back till its far from clear just where it began.  It's how I hope, too. In the book St. Patrick stands  with a staff and a sack at the root  of a road unspooling like God’s hair  or the slow drift of a loose lash into the Irish Hills. My daughter reads the silence and says I know you want to be that guy.  It’s okay. You’re the person you get to be, then proceeds to spill her water  and return me to myself, on my knees and shuffling on the endless trail  of all the mess and miracle that won't be held or bottled up.

In Search of the Lettuce Bird The official version harps its non- existence, but the official version has always been the inversion of a fish, meaning it doesn’t hold  together or swim in deep waters but stinks of decay and is best used  to attract alleycats or say  to children, “Look: here is why  you must forever dodge the hook.” I am not an alleycat or interested  in official versions, though still feel  a deep attachment to the innards of the commonplace earth,  which of course is not commonplace  at all, which of course is the main  point of this lecture where the teacher forgot the pointer but makes the point to gesture haphazardly around saying “see? Sea ? See? ”  It’s all a matter of this nattering  mattering . I offered a sparrow once  whatever weight my word was worth to hold my tongue if he loosed his  and shared the perfumed fringe of his most secret thought. I would have  bumbled in answer, Yes, I half- g...