L.R. Harvey Poetry

LEARNING TO CRAWL The question of her trajectory— toward ? away ?—is not really the point today. She is crawling. If slowly and awkwardly, moving.   This is the first flicker  of—here’s a father’s tender prayer—a blazing conviction  that there is somewhere beyond  the here worth getting to. Of course arrival matters too,  as does the course, but not now. Enough that  she believes the light striped across the kitchen floor  is tangible, and more,                                              worth reaching for.

GIVING UP Snaked over the toilet, retching,  this wretched creature resembling  me—resembling the “S”  in someone help me —requests something he might digest,  something simple enough  but solid, and able to fill  the famished, tender space. Please, no garnish. On top of this,  a firm hand on his shoulder  would be nice, reminder that another has stared into this abyss and knows. And then forgiveness for the mess he’s made about the place. It need be sharp and final as lemon Lysol.

UP AHEAD The sign’s task is to find us,  late at night somewhere and famished,  and offer such an enticing depiction  of the thing we alter our direction for even just a taste. Sheet metal and fluorescents tend not to fill the ache inside, which is why we leave them back behind on our road-trip to the real.  How silly, we tell ourselves, to fall   for symbols as the feast itself.  How silly, we fell ourselves,  taking another bite.    

  LINGERING  Most tragic are the atrocities of war after the war is over,  here in the furthest fields  where news is slow to travel.   Or even traveled, not yet heard  as meaning us , understood to denote that our long-habitual  rhythms must be unraveled  to the hilt. When will it sink in— in place of a bullet or a thin apprehension of what over means— this news of a decisive end  to things? The enemy is over- come: We needn’t do this anymore. 

RUBBER-NECKING Eyes on new construction  beside the freeway, and don’t we always get what we want  in the end, if only to find  our expectations twisted  in the wreck? Where we look we list, as wet St. Peter's sea steps can attest, starting to slip. This is the root predicament of teen drivers with attention deficit  disorder, loose-eyed lovers,  and really all the others who fell down the well- intentioned lie the mothers tell, believing it themselves: look, don’t touch.   This doesn’t help us much,  whose eyes have fingers with a reach.  What, then, of our innate ache to hold the whole, and where to set our gaze? If inward, then it’s down a ways,  well-past the normal scope of view.   If outward, looking at , then through.

  ALWAYS? Tonight it’s the future we toast  with the crushed bodies of the dead,  wash down the question in our throats before it slips out, said.  And what else is there to do  here—one eye weeping while the other tracks the thin path winding through the thickets—but give it the honor of drinking, both eyes open? Still,  wind whistles through a squirrel skull. It is a note that brings it to a boil again, this hope we know so well.  

UNDONE Easy to rest in the uncertainty  certain of: the mystery  aptly named, the question  whose silence is the affirmation  of a vastness unsounded,  the footing ungrounded suggesting someone is still  spinning the world. Less comfortable  when the cloud itself is hazy,  as in examined closely maybe  not a cloud at all but cataracts.  In view of such a fact, or lack of such, one yet is offered rest in that the options forward are limited,  tangible , as when suddenly waking  to a room you forgot you slept in: Panic! Or, sit tight and give it time. Perception and reality may still align.

THE MEETING               — for Stella It was not that I couldn’t  see him, or that he wouldn’t  show himself. He was all  desire to be seen, and I all eyes. He waited patiently for me to show, repeatedly  inquired after me by name.  And to know I didn’t know him,  and standing in the very room! No, it was not blindness. All the same, neither might I call it sight, despite the presence of light  and a being with mass. He was  there, exactly as promised. That said, his invisible nature  could be attributed to no other  factor but myself—simply put, I imagined him differently.

SEEK Interpreted as referring to us  as the active agent, we chase  him—room after endless room— till out of breath he remains  shirt-tails slipping around another corner, and we no closer  to a final finding. And finding this was never on the table,  the toddler—who is yet able to let himself be wanted— inverts the game, sitting under it instead with a cry of I’m hiding over here , and though not finding,  found.