L.R. Harvey Poetry

  Understanding Your Old Man  — for Emerson, Eden, and Shiloh It's 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...

Forklift Pushing my cart of quarter-round  which I will later mis-measure  and come clattering back for a second chance at making the cut,  they unwound the accordion  fence to fend off the register,  accord the man in the orange vest the space to make music behind  the controls. To take such a bulk  and not simply lift it but whirl it round like a pressure-treated planet  in the cramped space of our being here, wheels skirting calamity  of candy rack and stack of plywood by less than the width of  a breath, may I forever quiver as one  star-bit, finding no of words to serve a s a protective gloss to cover  this   beyond the grinning admission  of the woman at the fence, seeing my loss:  “That’s why he’s the boss.”

Remains Even when what was once wild, leafy,  unashamedly ungeometric, has been  bored out and planed down to fit neatly  on a hardware rack; even when  sap has been so unceremoniously sucked by steel, empty pores pressure-treated with a poison so green it won’t even let death cross the street, lingering live edges spray-painted purple and cursed  to the discount hell of what won’t  sell; even after such big-box  bastardization, such gear-gilled gutting of what once lifted the light in irreplicable fractals  of leaf-shimmer and shadow,   the fire is undeterred, embering all  the same. Yes, even when all we've left to offer is scraps and loose ends dumped callously as this, praise: that's real heat, a real flame.

Waiting   — for … And just like that it is today  again, and I am holding her this tenderly  not because I know how soft t he quivering crown of morning’s scalp, but because I have a splinter from shirking my work gloves as I tried to raise what’s sturdy  enough to shed time, to reach back and uncrinkle the tossed out blueprint of tomorrow. Remember  me not for this dreamer’s endeavor, how half-awake you found me  stumbling through the moment, through  every moment, but rather for how resilient  I proved in my forgetting, like a man with dementia  re-reading the book, delightfully  surprised again, again, again at how the sting of these invisible slivers loosens our grip enough to cradle  even the hope of breath itself.