L.R. Harvey Poetry

PULLING UP After morning coffee I sit to write in search of a God I haven’t felt  in some time, on whom I nonetheless pelt my poems like the texts  I sent my high school girlfriend months after our breakup: How’s it going?   What are you like these days?  What my daughter is like these days is everywhere—if short of omnipresent,  not by much—and at the present persistent in finding how best  to narrow the gap between us by clambering up the ladder  of my leg. Would it help to know, sweet girl, that my legs too are weaker than hoped,  and I myself have often coped  by crying, for example,  or giving up altogether to niggle  with crumbs beneath the table?  You might—if you were able— find some solace in that the puzzled struggle of your ascent is a universal    one. No, you are not alone in this endeavor, dear. This doesn’t make it easier,    but together we are pulling at the leg hair of a love that...

YEAR-END REVIEW Would you know this too as love:  the sour stain that clippings give  the air after the second mow this week.  That this year I tried to teach myself to garden, thought of you  as fingers prayed over the new sprouts yanked from womb to world.  That I care more about the world with you in it, notice the life of trees  on our suburban block—that, if slowly,  I have moved away from herbicides.  Or even how I leave you inside  with your mother, or with my body,  sitting with you there on the nursery  floor. It is not to be away from you, or be alone. It is to sit in the slow  pulse of presence, to better know  what is bigger, how best to introduce you.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD BLOCK: AN ODYSSEY  Flies busy in the tender crook  of a crow slow-cooked  on the asphalt. Three water bottles, dried, one crusted to the curb like an oyster shell. We answered “well” to the neighbor who wondered how we were,  said nothing of the bird  who nibbled at something tender in us. Wet tires whispered the long lament that words are  far too-edged to utter, and a dead leaf muttered its assent. Left at Old Mission and we found ourselves back at home,  far from home and still miles as the crow flies from having found ourselves.

THERE REMAINS YET VERY MUCH LAND TO POSSESS* — Along our chosen road are twists and turns and twists and turns. Uphill? Or up into the heavens? Let's go, let's stumble and stagger." —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn After the lesson we said goodbye, unsaid that it would never be the same and always would: a glimmer of something worth chasing after,  a step, a stumble, and—if forward at all—a tumble. We could be sure we were deeper than before and never deep enough, sure also that long after we were the dust collected on our knees we must  expect the road to carry on  without us, carry on if it is one  worth walking. Bags filled with all we knew by now we are called to abandon at the border, it was farewell as we entered the land of giants who will fall  not to us or to our generation,  not without us and our sons.                           ...

WHAT TO EXPECT ON RETURN You will meet a top sheet between  you, thick as any temple veil,  on descending from the dream.  She will roll over as you try to tell  her how neatly it's all stitched together:  how logical , really—if only she had been there!— the sudden shifts in the story, how cohesive, even linear  the narrative proves itself  when seen from the inner chamber! You will recieve a brief “hmhm,” a sniff. It wasn’t as if you knew   then either, you’ll explain, but more  that you didn’t need to know,  were carried by something more  than knowing. Even the sudden  disappearance of characters, the others who appeared unbidden on the scene, didn’t alter  the understanding that all  of it was going somewhere,  hurtling toward something good. All  this you will tell her before the sense begins to drip from the cracks in the cupped hands of your mind. Morning sunlight will slip  through the bedroom...

ANOTHER CENTER Physicists suggest a universe (as every one of us does,  and daily) that is expanding,  slow-spilling over the rim  like steam from a coffee mug  evaporating into the endless big.  They don’t suggest, these physicists,  a feasible antidote to fix this dilemma—a history of egos,  economies, and stars over- reaching their delineated borders which points to a pending collapse.   No expert on this universe of theirs, but might I yet suggest what’s worked for mine? Looking up and locking eyes with the stranger sipping a coconut latte, textbook open in front  of her, is all it takes. If you are able  to see her, if only momentarily, as real, the universal issue is solved— with a shudder, space halves.