L.R. Harvey Poetry

DEEP DARKNESS                  or, Toddler Talk With every why you tie a knot  on the rope that drops straight  down to the crawl space  of being, each question thus a foothold on which we might descend a little further yet into the heartbeat. Soon we are in complete darkness, alone with nothing but the Unseen Under-working, moist scent of unknowing on our skin as we reach the fraying  end of the rope and I say because, which is good enough for a brief silence but also firm enough to build a house on or an entire world.

ALL WHO KNOCK Too late we realized we were off a couple houses to the left—  or was it to the right?— were nonetheless surprised to find the curtain part, hinges creaking to our mis-calculated request for entry. Our maps had led us wrong, but "praise the Lord our maps are not the final say" as she reminded us, as if to say that maybe, in the way of neighbors who gently re-direct our steps, the God is a but neighbor- hood, and one with lots of doors which all lead to the Living room eventually, even if we get there a few minutes late with a story and sore knuckles.

HIS BODY IS MORE THAN A METAPHOR Intending to remind his dim  parishioners that God is in  the very room, and this despite  the empty pew where you’d expect  to see Him sitting were He truly  there, the priest invoked His holy  presence to attend the place,  since even in the absence of Your body You are here .  Amen. But tell me then, for I fear  this leaves me just a bit  perplexed about the flesh which sits in front of me, arms stretched around a wife and wriggling child wide as a protective bird or the invitation of a crucified criminal—priest, w hose hands are those? Whose penny-loafered feet?

 THE WORD WHICH IS THE CRUX OF THE POEM And as this word was torn apart, dis-membered in the bloody work of etymology, the curtain veiling  readers from a holistic reading  of the text was also torn in two.  Then suddenly we rendered through the poem’s ambiguity a certain  unity, and one which before was hidden from us—as if, with such a sacrifice  as this, the breaking up of one sufficed to unify the many, scattered lines into a single corpus,                                         very much alive.

BACK AGAIN It’s faith, hope, and love, as we  well know, but then, when these  flock south for winter months, perhaps we'd best include a fourth: black housefly caught between the shutters and a windowpane— again, again, again, against the cold, Immovable Silence.  Forgive me this presumptuous attempt to tweak St. Paul— blasphemy might be the word you're looking for—but  might the greatest of these be grit?

EXHUMING EDEN Even the poet has—as most of us— forgotten most of it, that memory’s  coherence splintered as a collar bone. The place the poet differs is his staunch insistence that  we not forget that we forgot,  persistent in the incremental  labor of puzzling it whole again. His little hammer rings a slow, meticulous re-membering. 

HERE           — for Emerson Even here—a picnic table beneath a tree outside the mother-baby unit—one might but briefly  supercede (or rather, supra-see ) our dim criteria for sight.  The fallout of a sleepless night? Perhaps. But look!, the parking lot is crowded now with presence not our own, choked with something thick  akin to glory, cicadas piercing like a baby’s cry through this half- sleep we once deemed deep enough.  Eyelids flutter to a newborn  apprehension that the God is far  more here and real—among other things— than we would ever dare to conceive.

  RESURRE-C7. The dark king’s demise is— as they say in the business— checkmate, pending.  To the pawn maneuvering  his neck beneath the sword,  this promise of a board with all the sidelined pieces  back in place as pre- ordained makes such  a necessary sacrifice  not even a little  bit easier, but possible.