L.R. Harvey Poetry

THE SCRABBLED GOD Enamored with the word as I've constructed it—a good   word too, if yet a couple  tiles short—I struggle to abandon what I've pieced together from the chaos  dealt. The more I stare the more impossible to tear my mind from what it wants to see, till gradually it clots like concrete or a scab, my vision  hardening to one configuration  of the letters in my hand. And here the game will end  unless I scrabble them again, re-discover what's abiding in my very hand. It is an act which  will necessitate a falling back  a turn or two to find—behind the mind’s partition—the word which dwells within the word.

MORNING DEVOTIONS I begin by addressing the god  with a choke collar, remind him with a pinch, a periodic yank, it is I who am taking him for a walk.  We circle the block.  Domesticated as I'd like to think  he is, he always pulls.  No, this way, I say. He will  not listen long. continues to resist the strength of the restraint.  And when the leash snaps (as it was bound to do,) just like that the god is wild again, and faster than our best attempts to wrangle him. What is love  but this:                  s et free, he doesn’t leave.

AT THE BAPTIST CHURCH She should be grocery shopping.  He, face up beneath a leaky sink trap, thumbs fumbling with a seal.  Toddlers ought to be allowed to squeal.  It is a sunny, November day— Saturday—which is to say her 11-year-old brother  should not feel any guilt for  thinking of baseball or Pokémon  as the varsity volleyball team  carries her past, proceeds to set her one last time, up front. More  to the point, the pews are filled with those who dropped it all  to be here today, as they were right to do, despite the fact they can't quite shake the latent understanding  that—of course—they shouldn’t be.

THE GUARD Imprisoned here by flowers                no more than flowers,                                stars long since understood  as compounds self-destructed              near-millennia ago, a cardinal                               f laming in the flaming alder  tree, (both lucky victims                 of genetic pigmentation,)                               can we dare to blame him     for his gradual acclimation                 to this, his earthy cell?          ...

WATERED Where might we find the tears the world doesn’t weep? Remembered good—sole requisite for lament over its loss—is lost, and loss is minted currency here, the blood of children leached to fuel the machine in its endless crawl towards itself. Come, let us grieve together  over a dead dog, bury it out back before they try to resurrect  it with a pill. The lie of progress will still trill its harmonies without a bass part, but it’s a start— this drip off a child’s chin— flood enough to re-cover the garden   (or at least make us miss it again.)

NOSTOS           I. The tropes are never wholly wrong— there is such thing as siren song.  That said, the voices that you hear are not desires but your fears.  Do not tie yourself to the mast.  They will not draw you off the path  but to it, down straight  to Hell, then through it.          II.  Odysseus swept the suitor’s stench, the priest who swore the devils made me do it,  even the dozen maids who chit- chat behind his back  about the beggar’s rags.  There was no wiggle room  in his Shalom.  Fire kissed the marble white again, the warble  of a swallow in the rafters heralding he’s here, he’s here , which he is—that is, the Master— so very, very here, if still invisible in his disguise, or more, our blurry eyes.