L.R. Harvey Poetry

The Tinkerer Works on Himself No taste for cucumber, squash,  but he sows a handful each March  to see if he can train himself  up a trellis, as if maybe  it’s as simple as you just start  doing the type of things  the person you want to be  does. Like maybe smiling  is the best way to become  one of those approachable people,  or not talking so much a sure step toward the contemplative  type. But then, come every July,  he's finds a thatch of vine so thick he can’t recall   which is which, what he likes and what he'd like to all knotted at the roots.

  Is it True?  Every year an undercooked batch of sophomores, every year the same  stale questions hurled like boulders  at the unkempt dingy floating round the whiteboard: was Odysseus  real? Okay but did Beowulf  really ? Yeah but how do we know?  It’s the facts they’re after, those little pebbles they like to fill  their pockets with to make sure  they don’t float away between bells, and hell  I guess it makes sense because they haven’t  been to many weddings yet,  watched the fact of two smiling stories come crashing  together to form not just a third  but the title character of every one  to come, haven’t yet seen  how at a wedding, even though really no one cares for dates  unless you’re stopped up  and eat them as a kind of medicine,   they can become a small part  of something wondrous delivered on a silver platter by a guy  dressed in white. What’s that?  Sure, tru...

Beyond the Tinkerer’s Purview  But then, despite his swelling shed of tailored tools and know- how, there’s all the shattered things to which he brings  just two eyes like liquid nails  to a job with no backing  to bond, useful as the guy  who turns off the water for the plumber then sits by  crunching little peanuts of small talk about the Braves.     Like lunch with the student  stirred to pour out what’s backed up  since dad’s slow-drip descent  to the guest room, or the way he cannot stop the light  from revealing to his kids  all the painted-over places.  And then that breaking news, the one about the next-door town  on the other end of the world  who lost its daughters to the blast of an errant missile. He went home  and tore up his shed but there was nothing he could find to twist a nut  on the live wire of such  a severing, no one to teach him how to put a declarative end-poi...

New Fixture  And having finally gotten down  to climbing up and grounding the green in the junction box,  at last we canned the old canned fixture   and a new light shone in the living  room, our new living room  by the way things seen  in a new light are new things,  like this daughter of mine I’m forever running after  even as she sits  across from me at the dinner table, yesterday’s big truck  pulling always up the street and out  of reach as a pigtail dangles  out the back like a power cord.

Repair Washing machine this week, Sunday last  the nook behind the dishwasher   his self-sized cathedral. Week before that he told his therapist the fear,  the one rolled tight in him  like a snapped Achilles, and in return   the shrink didn’t try to fix it but said  it was good to be said, how he had seen  his own a week ago to say  some things that bore saying, that that was how this thing works.  He doesn’t know how this thing works, the mechanics too tight to see and if he could still well- beyond his expertise, but he knows  he’ll be here again next week in another tight spot, sweating    in the work of repairing  what repairs the dirty dishes,  the growing mound of soiled socks.

Becoming III Maybe it’s as simple as you just start doing the type of things  the person you want to be  does. Maybe those people  who seem to slip so seamlessly  into their skin just took the in- complete on their definition of self and got on with it. Maybe  kindness is the best way to become one of those kind people,  or not speaking so much  a sure step toward the contemplative type. And forgive me, of course it’s never  that simple, but even now  a four-year old bends over  the orange strawberry,  neither one too ripe to quit  willing the other into sweet red.