L.R. Harvey Poetry

Trade School Because I received my Masters in Divinity from a goldfinch bending down  to the dirt a cornstalk  like a long green finger  scratching the world’s furrowed brow. With what the maggot’s left  of his eyes the barn owl  at the roadside agreed to attend  my dissertation. I defended  how, in Chickamauga now,  the battlefield is covered  in aster, ten thousand for every fallen seed, how four doe graze  the abandoned church  whose doors will not stay closed.  At some point down the hill  my diploma flew off  the back of the bike on a wind that smelled of hay row, rain, the sweat of the big man smiling in pain as he jogged past. So you’ll either need to trust  me on this or go digging  yourself, deep into the archives.

Back to School At what level do you learn to say  two sisters, four and two,  sweat-sheened and collapsed to watch clouds on the trampoline  under the riotous pink  of a crepe myrtle?  School goes back in weeks and they'll look at me for answers, though I've told them knowing things doesn't pay well as a career, the landscape too shifting for job security. If I'm absent at the bell you'll find me here, on the porch and tending whatever thunderhead this is simmering just below the breast bone before it explodes  into a dinosaur, a ship, a joy  so like grief you could see it either way and still not quite trace out the edges  come time to point it out.

For Sale: Raised Beds For those who need a border to know  where to dump their bag of dirt and the weight of this urge  to give new life a go. For those  who itch to see earth elevated  but don’t know what to do  with seven cedar planks, forty-two  star-bit screws. With a bit  of maneuvering, the chance of a garden    fits in the back of most vehicles  cleaned out, seats down, but margins are thin. Who of us can balance  the book of our lumbering,  say for certain all we’ve spent  or what square feet of fresh start we’ve helped a stranger load?  How suddenly the yellow tape comes  whirring back, snapped shut  and pocketed before we can  mark the lasting measures.

The Tinkerer Nearly Punches Through He can’t manufacture it,  but sometimes when the mower’s  up on blocks and the bearings hammer out  whole, and black cherry pipe smoke  slips into brake grease like sweat-slicked lovers, and bees d rone drowsy round the uncut clover praying   the part doesn’t fit, and not a monarch but one of those little black ones  touches down on the ratchet set   as the neighbor looses rounds  in the woods behind the house,  he can't mix words to cement it but senses there's a knowing under- girding what he knows, a hand holding the hand holding the wrench, or a stillness beneath the stillness like the baseline hum of box-fan clicking suddenly off.

The Tinkerer Puts His Tools Away Because nothing is ever really  fixed, and the firm grape slips around the porcelain plate  no matter how he sharpens  the fork, so he turns now to the grueling work     of floating in the flux, a kid on the swings content to press bare feet  again and again into the wet cement  of sky. The secret kids keep is that you can walk before it sets,   that you needn't pick between being certain as a beetle's grip on the world's finger and as easily flicked off, that—turns out—that drawer of dirt-stained instruction manuals makes great paper planes if you learn to let them go just right.

  The Tinkerer: Reckoning Like that pile of scrap, so many things he wants to become, but never graduated from being the utility guy he was in college ball, a cleat firm at each  position, love refusing to let him become an expert. When he finds himself  in the splits he tries to trust the ache is not a tear but a long-coming loosening like a too-tight tendon. In the mirror he can still see himself there,  spitting seeds and stretching  down the left-field line, wondering  who he’s going to be  today and exercising his trust there’s still  a solid spot for such fluidity  in the line-up card tacked over the bat-rack.