L.R. Harvey Poetry

In the town that lost its daughters to a single blast, the boys grow up  with no one to kiss them out of their iron ideas and back  into the velvet touch of the living room couch. Naturally they will  kill each other i n a later act. No one plays with the dolls  and stuffy's and lovey's so the dolls  and stuffy's and lovey's are not played with,  and, seeing this to be so, bank the latent glow behind their painted lids and recede back into plastic, and the trees, seeing this, know  that the animus has left the place  and stop whispering their pine-scented secret to Saturday afternoons and the crow  and the occasional pair of pigtails that used to listen in and giggle at their pluck, now embarking  on their return to inanimate exchange of sunlight, water, and a sugar y ou've read about but can't taste. The roads are repaved remarkably straight,  what with everyone knowing where they’re going  and no one not knowing enough a...

Wardrobe I am a study in false-starts. I have tried and tried more to keep in separate drawers my project pants from more projectable   slacks, but the dividers crumble till it all slides back in the jumble like each fresh attempt to save receipts. I get out my books and teach with paint on my ass, take the bread and wine with caulk smeared down my left leg. When I reach  into my pocket for a pen I find a Philips head and the clink of a few, loose words. Screw it again. I am a walking project.  

The Tinkerer Repents No one, likely, will ever see the fresh coat of white  on the back of the doghouse,   the part slid flush to the house and invisible unless you drop something important back there and slide it out, which no one, likely, will ever do. So I considered,  considering, not wasting the work of another hour on my knees for what’s behind and unseen, but man there's something to it, how deep the sleep that knows a future   that—if you ever need to re- arrange the garage—you can.

The Tinkerer: Biography           Beginning: 1990-something            Terminus: He'll get around to it Neither skilled nor unskilled. Not so much a lack  of love for things finished but an eye  for too much that needs finishing. He knows what he builds will not stay forever built, but does not find the hardware of that truth sufficient to hold  back his hammer. When he hears  the song sundered, the grammar  lilting left, his tune is troubled. He is deaf  enough both not to know what went awry  and to try. Regarding this and that,  here and there, the split hairs  of what and why, he does not find them irreparably sundered. Why not me? he often wonders. Sometimes he weeps when he works. Laughter, too.  The pointed rage of a dropped screw.  No one calls it craftsmanship but he gets by   with good. The further beyond  his means the need the more piercing ...

Heaven There's nothing wrong with "getting in," but if ours was a kinship with a ticket at the end, like I were the bouncer you flounced up to and flirted with, eyes flitting always over my shoulder into the inner  room of the exclusive night club,  I would not say I knew you, or we were friends. And if you were a bit more savvy,  for weeks or even years returning to ask me  about my family, tell me the latest of  yours, till you couldn't hide your boredom and tried to push in past me to receive your great reward, I would still not stamp you as one  of my own. For that I would need to be  the end of your waiting, my eyes  your flashing lights, my name in your mouth the only cup to carry you to the dawn.

  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.