L.R. Harvey Poetry

MORNING MASSACRE As if they were all the words for the poem I couldn't find, they clustered there—fifteen or so— like black-pepper specks before the dish soap drop, like so many thoraxed cows  around a hay bale, or the crowd of students gyrating around Ms. Beth  to see the dish soap experiment.  Ants are easier to kill than cows and people are harder to kill than cows,  but this morning I was touched  by the common thread of breath so touched them instead with the tip  of my pencil to gently disrupt the gathering. They scattered, revealing. the mangled body of a baby centipede.  I killed them then—fifteen or so— in anger and in the name of a poem I imagined, which is the reason we kill so many things.

​​PACKING FOR THE NEEDLE’S EYE You mean all the good things we keep in the house? You mean all the wisdom in all the book collection? You mean how sharp I look  in my new blue button-down?  Does this include windows-down in the Subaru? And what about  Bun-Bun, my daughter's rabbit?  Surely there’s room for Bun-Bun,  right? Blue-crab gnocchi with wine for our anniversary? My evening  pipe? What about this growing hoard of words, the swelling mound of questions I've slowly accumulated? Wait, there’s no 50-pound weight limit? Why are you smiling like that?   Are you saying I can bring it all? I must ? You mean everything ?

GROUNDING We’d park at the cow pasture, hike  through autumn angst and thick  excrement of summer, the air  dizzy with fireflies and over there the fair lights glistening like sweat on a girl's neck as their lips meet in the cotton-candy dark. Intent to prove I was grown now—even loved the upside-down—I’d run from ride  to rumbling ride those nights,  inviting vertigo, then sneak off to a bench when the spin became too much, sip cool tap water from a Nalgene bottle I'd brought from home.  Sometimes I still feel the need to ground myself, the way even the Hellhound was riveted into something sure.  Faith and fatherhood are enough to turn   any inside out. I sneak off these nights too, slip into the nursery where she  sleeps with bunny draped over one arm,  and touch her hair. How little I am  certain of. How certain the little mystery curled there, breath steady and circling. 

DYSLEXIC THEOLOGY Student 1: "How do you spell 'knowledge?'"          Student 2: "Know—ledge" Frustrating, I'm sure, and even more so due its unremitting nature. But then again, we might also  invert your despair, no?  Able still to admit your inability  to straighten things, maybe this is your true beginning.  There is no shame in struggling  to parse out “knowledge.”  Come, let’s snap it at the hinge—  as if it ever really fit together— then stumble headfirst over  the know ledge into the dark  and wordless waters, sink into something illegible and wild as a dog—no wait, a God—unleashed.

WALKING IN SEATTLE  “ Uphill? Or up into the heavens? Let’s go, let’s stumble and stagger.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn The hill was no mountain,  girding us with no conviction  that this was a holy ascent but still a hill, as our backs bent forwards like a prayer were intent to testify at every stretch.  We were not wise but wise enough to know that to arrive by Streetcar would mean to find  a different place, and so inclined  we trudged our way upwards another couple hundred yards.  The sidewalk let down  its thorny braids, and the sun  ramped up as shoulders slumped,  but blackberries too, in clumps.