L.R. Harvey Poetry

A Pilgrim's Confession Wrong turns and double-backs abound, but every time, my Guide, you lead me blind and faltering, through fear, if not directly to the chosen path, near.  So if the vilest danger lurking in  this pilgrim's navigation of the dividends is not the straying from a destination pre- ordained, might it not therefore be the slow intrusion of a comfort in  this seeming inability to find?— the subtle but parasitic draining of  all expectation that there’s such  a thing as far-off holy lands to merit pilgrimage at all?

Death by Triteness This house of representatives,  suspended in the filmy thick of everyday mid-morning, holds white-knuckled to its stagnancy. Grown putrid with routine, a white clay discuss masquerading as a plate— a sprouting thrust of metal-work, that given time  and space for repetition, has come to represent a breakfast fork—  and standing like the minute-hand beside an aromatic cylinder  of steaming clay, one has to ask:  ‘Is this the world as it is or as we’ve named and parceled it?’ A pressing question, surely, but one  quite difficult in answering with certainty, as it is blood and dust that masquerades as man that plays the role of world-definer.

7 Grades of Desire The slow digress—your adolescent eyes from twenty algebra equations yesterday put off—as strolling down the hall a polar force of magnetism, navy leggings, pulls them helpless from the (X+7). How I’d like to help you solve this prepubescent problem that perplexes you. Let's break it down and say that X, in mathematic's purest objectivity ,  (and maybe this is all a hunch,  but isn’t that the surest form of truth?)  is equal to the clack and click of pebbles we collect to try and plug the leaky dam, the subtle drip we down-deep know. And closer to the source of things are you than all the leathered, coarse practitioners of parceling the this from that, psychologists content to say that you are but another sexual awakening. "And what," they claim , " the horny adolescent feels, and that which flips the seeker through his manuscripts or heaven’s thick expanse, must be understood as flowers from a di...

Stability          The game ends when the tower falls. - Jenga rulebook Discontent with in-betweens,  perhaps it is a subconscious need  for empathy that slides him out of bed at 6:15, slides his feet across the tile floor to pull a chair beneath the lunette window. Taut air  and fickle light sit blue and discontent for twenty passing minutes,  stuck languishing between the dark and day, but strangely he is reassured. This happened yesterday, he tells himself, tomorrow it will be the same, and faith in time's unshakable resiliency, a shaky faith, but nonetheless the stuff he's building with, slides one more Jenga sliver in  the quaking tower of halves and in- betweens he now inhabits, half- believing somehow it will stand, half- expecting otherwise, praying it will hold just long enough for him to grope the long way upwards, puzzle out the footing for the scramble...

Book of Life Like most in-print anthologies,  expect this one to be  chock-full of unknown names,  beneath each one a too-thin line of qualifications, and, like others, self-published by the editor.

Muse on Market St. They pilgrim towards the holy land  on Tuesday nights, four weary walkers, thin and thirsty from the road without an end, converging, if for a moment,  to rest beside the dusty path  and share a drink. The tall one asks  about the Wanderlinger ale. They light their thrift-store pipes, their cigarettes.  They riff about the ways of women,  about the trip one plans to take, and given time, about the way the world slips like silt between the knuckles of the hand that tries to clinch it whole.  In time, they reassure themselves,  it surely must solidify  from silt to stone, the night of shadow-thick philosophies become  a light as tangible as the one that flickers through the smoke  above their heads, and they, flickers themselves of some undying flame,  will with the rest become the shimmers they have always been. Till then, the weary Pickle Barrel waiter...

Saturday Snowfall The trees reveal their skeletons,  their nakedness exposed to all  by winter’s way of revealing our dependencies, but sitting in the kitchen by the space-heater, pen  in hand while the timer clicks the pot  on brew, I am content and fed and caffeinated— but then again  so were the Israelites, the manna floating down from heaven like today, and out they scrambled, tried to hold security in baskets weaved of reeds, tried to save until tomorrow gifts not for  tomorrow, collecting snowfall for  the spring then cursing as it dripped and crawled with maggots in the night. Content and fed and caffeinated, a muffin steaming on my plate, remind me this is enough, sufficient.

Glory Refracted Though beautiful, it will not reach  its fingers through the dirt to push  the dormant living up against the heavy law of gravity.  It will not send the blind man running,  leaping in praise that there is such  a place as this, that on the dark of ignorance the light of knowing has settled like a morning dew.   Refracted rays go dancing on  the ripples of the lake, but they  are not what keep the carp and walleye  swimming, the algae growing on  the surface, the shore-reeds clustered thick, as convoluted as the light we grapple for, craving it as if it were the source itself.

Posture If asked my deepest fear, I wouldn't say the flames,  tied to the post of martyrdom  or banging from the inside of a house—  n ot millstones hanging from my neck to drown in front of chanting crowds, to hear their cheers become a hum become a silence deep as where I’m sinking— n ot even empty years of memory become like TV static, a channel no one watches, the volume turned down low to hush the senseless buzz. No,  it is a Wednesday evening, sometime in June,  and standing on a beach somewhere, the slow philosophy of waves on thoughtful waves,  and up above God’s promise to Abraham— or maybe late October, the yellow leaves beneath my hiking boots, and resting on  an overlook to count the countless bumps of mountain tops—                        ...

Living Water With faith for what he cannot see,  he wedges sideways in behind the holly bush, the sleeping seeds already sprouted in his mind: so thick, so green. The rusty knob that holds the life-source squeaks, the sun- dried rubber throat beginning to gulp on future flower beds and lawns so fresh they’ll turn the neighbors green with jealousy. A whisper turns into a choke, a hiss, and then the air is sprinkling diamonds on their heads, while with a kindred shout the children shuttle back and forth  beneath this generosity, their out- stretched fingers reaching, grasping for  the flashy fragments of a wealth that slips between their thirsty hands.