L.R. Harvey Poetry

  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...

Onlooker Increasingly, of late, despite his swelling shed of tailored tools and know- how, he finds a tilted or twisted thing to which he brings to the table just a warm body standing by to look on, the way he did  before scootering off barefoot around the driveway when his dad taught him  to change oil in the blue suburban, or when, last July, his wife broke  down and called the plumber  and he sat by and warmed the bench as guy who turns off water  then crunches little peanuts of small talk about the Braves.   And sometimes he can’t even find  the tool for the shut-off valve  to keep the whole place from going  under, like last-week’s lunch with a student  stirred to pour out the backed-up  mess of her parents’ divorce, or how he can nearly feel the fissures of his daughter's mind widen, widen, past the binding power of daddy's caulk. Last week, even, he walked home to a news story  about the next-door town on the ot...

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.  Take this child of mine who I’m forever running  after, yesterday’s big truck  pulling 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.

Foundation Dilemma  He knows that to really get  under the comforters and tidy up the bed- rock the house must  be stripped like sheets, the fitted one he has  worked so tirelessly to keep  cornered must be utterly de- paired: insulation from sheetrock,  sheetrock from studs,   patched pipes popping  from couplings like cut veins  till nothing remains but a soup  of sewage and what once was dry-   wall. And he’d pray for such a severing storm, even swing  himself the sledge, could he be sure the children  would emerge from the wreckage clear- eyed and assuring they understood how necessary the nightmare to such a crisp, unshakeable morning.