L.R. Harvey Poetry

At Dawn Aproned, the Kansas farmer’s wife wipes out the flower-dusted bowl, the egg-yolk sun now breaking out of the fragile misty shell of morning, cracked on the horizon’s rim. Somewhere in the city, a sleep-deprived student will watch the sky-bound desk lamp shine through her apartment window, breaking up her fitful sleep on piles of Kant and More. Six months ago today he saw the same indifferent eye of god rise up to look down on him with mocking warmth, the body of his wife of fifty-one years beside him, cold, while in a London tenement a girl will rise and dress in ecstasy to meet the long-awaited day when from thereon she’ll never have to wake in bed alone.   It raises more than warmth: To him a hope, to her a question, to me today a poem on the porch. To you, reading this somewhere, I guess you have until evening to wait and see.

Wine Breath I’m secondhand drunk again.  My head in your lap, the earthy scent of discount Pinot Noir unravels from your lips like spools of yarn tumbling off of your tongue.                                             You slowly recap your day, the lilting rhythm of your speech as hypnotizing as Nana’s needles clacking when she would knit at night, her fingers speaking lovely secrets to the wooly yarn at each and every stitch.                            It means a different sort of thing to everyone: To the woman next door, the smell of stale Cabernet is warning more than welcome, and she will spend the evening hours delicately avoiding his probing eye like she would do in middle school when the teacher asked her a question.        ...

the days are derby colts It looked like miles when seen through windblown eyes. The Barlow brothers next door had brand new bikes with bells, and intent on proving that ours could fly the same — yes mom, we have our helmets — we’d lock our flip-flopped feet into stirrups and bend our backs like the concrete strip was Churchill Downs. And down the hill and past the church we’d wind in careless ecstasy, our t-shirts blown like wide-brimmed derby hats, those August evenings when we would race like we were running from the end of Summer.  We’d gradually slow, begin to argue about the winner, then pedal-turn to sludge our aching way uphill until we felt the asphalt sticking to our tires, dragging us down and making our muscles feel as if they too were made of concrete. They tired quickly those days. Dismounting to slog on foot we’d urge our steeds with sweaty hands and tongues as dry as track dust.  We were going up and growi...

"Don't water that. That's a weed." What is a weed but an unexpected moment of growth, a trod-on seed’s insistent statement of presence springing forth at last to life; it is the soil’s renewing oath of unpredictability, an earthy reminder that the essence of life is rooted in mystery that cannot be plotted out with certainty. A weed is that which we did not plant and do not deserve: the unexpected smile lingering about the corners of your lips, the long-evasive word that drips unbidden off of your hovering pen,        or even that sudden moment of crystal awareness in which you briefly see the unveiled world for what it truly is: a place of undeserved moments of unexpected beauty -- a place that is covered in weeds.