L.R. Harvey Poetry

HOLY MOUNTAIN TRAIL HEAD Primarily just stay   the trail as blazed.                 A nd please, of course, flush yourself               at rest stops . Oh, and seeing as we've got you here, trust us, don't be over anxious                if, ascending the foothills               of the Unapproachable Ascent, you find your vision start to swirl               with something like altitude               sickness, or vertigo . This  is, per nature the trip,  to be expected. Get a grip.               D on't panic, even when                your face goes up in flame.

CRATING THE BIG BLACK DOG                 or, A Treatise on Systematic Theology The way a shadow stays a step ahead , or maybe how a sun-spot, dancing in the ken's periphery, forever scuttles out of reach: either way, He's back behind the couch again—(the big black God)— crouched in the slender space we rarely stoop to look, abiding there, a nick- beyond  the stretch of our groping fingers. Here is where He’ll linger. When, at last, we corner Him, cram Him in a crate  (so we can shut our eyes a bit,) it'd be a leap to say our rest is satisfactory.                          Dearest, something tells me He wants out.

LIVED Marine biologist, jump naked off  a pier in the Pacific for a change, and if  you see him, music theorist, follow suit and catch a cab to open mic night at the jazz club downtown.  Listen, linguist: consider how  it'd feel to take a break from breaking words, to taste. And see? Now the poet  and the theologian have quit  attempts at splitting up the Word themselves, and are (if you’re looking for  them) sipping on a beer while  listening to someone in a suit wail  a saxophone. Get my point? 

THE SHAPE OF A QUESTION Considering He dwells (& well-) beyond our few and far-between conclusions, resides (as mystics pointedly presume) in every point of space and time, but then proceeds to blow our periods like a late yellow light, we might be best to rest a minute in a question's shade— or say, instead, we flip the mark upon its head (¿ C omo éste ?) and rock in it, sip a lemonade. This is, you'll find, a delightful exercise, if for a time, but rock a while and you'll remember that lemonade doesn't fill a hungry man. Go in and eat.

HARVEST Not yet. Now is time  for dirt-creased thumbs and poems barren  of conclusions.  Now is grass seed  and word seed, seed tossed arcing like a prayer, a hope that, maybe somewhere, an ear. Now? This is time for calloused hands  and calloused knees,  the daily pulling of the weeds around your plot, however small.  And come the Fall?  Not yet.

UNEARNED For those with clean-up hitter power  of the will to still the hey batter  batter chatter up there, dispassionate withdrawal does the trick, or that’s  the thought. For those like me,  it takes a Lookout Mountain breeze— of which I'm no composer but yet a grateful recipient— to momentarily rend the mist  webbed thick between the conifers, gift me a passing glimpse  of Rock City, the sun.

ACCIDENT The catalyst was craft- a-constellation on the glass. There was traffic. It was night. And for the champion? A light drizzle of window-shield sprinkled on the chest,   as if I needed just one more  reminder close to the heart that it takes more than stars to guide us through the mist, get us home in one piece.

OFF-KILTER Tilted just a little right, a bit now to the left, remember that overcorrection is a leading cause  of adolescent accidents, adult break- ups. Consider Christmas tree fiascos, heresies, the incremental loss of sanity to area rugs, frames. Sometimes I like to readdress the strange epiphany that if The Infinite   is truly borderless, this necessarily implies that       I am centered.  Note: this is not a well thought-out theology. Still,  take it, align it as you will.

BOY WITH HORNET His scabby knees propel him  barefoot and burning  across the asphalt strip, the long one separating here from home.  Fingers grip his Mason-heart, eager to show his father that here, yes here ,  inside the fragile jar,  you’ll find contained a fragment of the flame.  

FIRE PIT Triune stack of bricks in geometric infinite equivalent,    your outer visage, given time,  has undeniably accrued a kind   of weather-beaten pallor,  or should I say a more- than-subtle indication  of a certain exterior exhaustion— gray, we'll deign to say. Yes,  though then I’d be remiss  to miss the seemingly significant observation that your inner parts remain as scarlet the day you came,  licked cleaned by cloven tongues.* *This hints at Pentecostal flame. 

ULTRASOUND UNREST Primarily the way  their adolescent eyes will prick and penetrate— like god’s do mine—her shirt.   Though even worse, that she, (like me,) convince herself that when a part of her thus collapses, hardens on itself  like crumpled sandwich foil, this is just the way  it's meant to be.    

TREAD LIGHTLY Round 7am, and I had dreamed that god resided in an acorn, and then, on waking up  and taking Odie for a walk beneath a yellowing cathedral dome, determined it was true,  which wholly alters the way I walk in the Fall and really all amen

GRATITUDE OF A PERPLEXED MYSTIC  My inability to penetrate the cloud  becomes, (if such absurd descent- theology is true,) moot, considering  it’s necessarily implied I’m writing  this—yes this —within a mist.  As is the case with dull Odysseus,  my dog, a lack of clear articulation isn’t near  a detrimental handicap since his ability to speak the name is less  important than that he comes  when spoken to. We’ve long  ago established I can’t climb my way out of this. Thanks for repelling in.

AFLAME Or maybe Moses knew this glimpse  of flames leaf-licking off a bush's lips                 was not, per se, absurd ,                 but more a manifested word  articulating what he dimly apprehended as the vague reality—                the one he’d really always knew—                thus making this but dejá vu. Or put another way, as if the spark long-latent in his hearth                had fluttered up the flue                and through  the rafters on a breath, and found,  on then descending down,                dry tinder,                which said to him, Remember.

BUMPER WORD An ill-informed decision to accelerate and inadvertently to relegate his pocket apprehension of the god to street- leaves, post-fall. Now all about the interstate are scattered small, divided signifiers of the Whole, Who, thirteen years later, he's still attempting to consolidate before he sputters to a stop, stuck somewhere  without a map and far away from  home. 

THAT The fix is, well, ambiguous,  but nowhere near ambiguous the ache. Again you wake up in the night and cannot shake your craving for… your craving for… you're craving to identify the craving, more, as if to name it or to nibble it were nigh inconsequential. Again you know the itch but are not flexible enough to reach  it. Again you cannot say the thing,  the thing you crave, again. 

YARD WORK, EASTER SUNDAY Left long to chase its natural bent, the place had nearly gotten out of hand.  Clover, weeds, and wild hyacinth  said boundaries were projections of the mind, and lines as strong as wrong and right became, like that which shrouded them, ambiguous, and fodder for debate. The night was long, but birds now dripped their lime juice in the open wound of day. The ground, stung back to life from Friday's freeze, rejoiced!—now he’d rouse and set it all to rights.  

EXISTENTIAL ANGST AT 5AM Conviction is, per fact, a perfect word  to institute a pentametric verse.  Later, when things invert themselves a bit,  you’ll likely find yourself recalling it  with something like a fondness bordering  sentimentality, as you’re beginning  to see that things have a way of falling out of form                       quite quickly.

MY LAST POEM              "Beginning definition, there are names; once names exist you must know where to stop." - Tao Te Ching The question of h ow many ways are there to say what silence says? contains, deep down, we know   an answer bound to be a bit abstruse— something like, as many names are names  enough to name the Om— but a ll the same,  the disappointment is poignant.   Babble builds with broken bricks.   Don’t understand? Try backing out  of an inadvertent comment about  your lover’s weight, and watch the way  the more you say the more away the object of affection moves.   But then, you know a good alternative?   Or say that metaphor's a jello prison, and, as such, (if tasty,) still a prison. Heaven knows we’re  bursting at the lining long before  we chew our way to freedom! Homeless, can we speak ourselves to home? Enough. 3rd grade she told me how she felt in le...