L.R. Harvey Poetry

  ST. ANDREW’S DAY I imagine it felt like a hook sunk in the soft skin of your cheek, the sound of your name in his mouth.  I imagine you were worn out  from hauling in empty nets again and again, that when you felt the line grow taut you were almost glad to let yourself fall overboard into water over your head and be caught for a change, flopping at his feet and gasping for something more                   than air.

ON THE ROAD Raindrops on the windshield at dusk,  and brake lights smudge like a thousand roses.  What did I do to deserve this,  or the view from Shell Mountain pass last week that I could almost taste, or how  she hunches her shoulders and scrunches her nose when I call her a little stinker, staring at me in the rear-view mirror from her car-seat?  Yesterday a student returned my copy of On the Road by Kerouac, and I could see the answer in her eyes but I asked anyway  what she thought of Moriarty and The Chase,  and she said he said everything  I think, and I knew what she meant  and what she thinks because it’s what I think and he thinks and we think,  which is that it’s just too much for us and never, ever enough.

DAY HOME WITH DAD When mom leaves she runs to the storm door and presses her hands against the glass between them now. Despite her promise of return there are many tears as the white car carries her like a cloud, out of sight. A man appears then by her side, and taking her hand  says something like “she’ll be back later, she promised,” gently turning her around to go eat breakfast, because there is  more than enough work to be done here and plenty of play too in the long hours  of waiting, and we’ll need a good meal  to keep us strong until the longed-for sound of gravel as the rocks cry out a triumphal return.

ANOTHER REMINDER OF WHAT WE'RE WAITING FOR The morning mist was soft mimesis of the mountain, mirroring its fist and knuckled contours, if just a bit lower, gentler,  as if it were an echo or a toddler by his father’s knees. Or maybe the mountain itself was descending, sending its image down into the city just waking to find  themselves—like it or not—surrounded,  subsumed, even breathing in the peak  that until then was beyond their reach.

SOME THINGS YOU NEVER LOSE I was fast, and I played right field because I had—in diamond  vernacular—a cannon on my arm. I’d love to watch   them chatting the coach on first, knowing they’d try to stretch from first-to-third on a Texas-leaguer, and then it would happen and I’d uncork a frozen rope, watching it hiss  on their heels then overtake  the runner as he slid into the tag.  My labrum’s torn now, but I still  watch them run and can still hurl  it: turns out that pride has just such seams and a familiar heft in my hand.

TRANSCENDENCE IS SAFER Until the Christmas cards come my friends who live at a distance remain unchanged—by keeping them  in different states I can, till then, stall time.  And as high as it is today, the sun is a low- risk relational investment, more slow  to change than the trees, which are— even in this Advent season—far more stable than my daughter, a toddler leafing out every day. Is it fair  to say the farther out you keep a thing the easier to believe there are certainties  that will always be? This is why  sometimes when she runs to me,  toothy grin and arms out wide,  something in me wants to run away.  This is why sometimes I wish  He had stayed the mysterious  one, hadn’t become the toddler who chases me daily saying                          hold you, hold you.

  UNBOXING THE NATIVITY The clay figures recline inanimate  and cold, stiff bodies prostrate in their boxes as they wait  for the season of waiting to break through Ordinary Time like a virgin’s voice piercing the night to call her children home. Room must first be cleared in those areas grown cluttered through the year with the chaos of living, and then the Theotokos there, in the center, the warm child pulsing in her calloused, inexperienced  hands. One by one they draw near  like winter’s pilgrims to a fire, and something latent begins to thaw then, stirring as they face this infant made of just such clay as theirs: three mind- weary magi come to the tenuous end  of knowing, a couple tired shepherds,  a smattering of sheep who offered the chance will up and lose themselves. And one other looks on, not of the original cast,  hoping himself to become something more  than a cold, inanimate figure.

A LOVE POEM Last night my wife said,  unprompted, it’s kind of crazy, marriage.  And I said what do you mean,  even though I knew it was her way of saying we barely knew each other.  And then I said remember  when we were first married and we slept in different layers?  You tucked the comforter and I  liked it loose, so I  felt stuck and you felt adrift,  like there was more than a sheet between us. Years later it was true what we uncovered,  I think. She smiled and then we kissed,  and we’re pulling back layers  again, hoping still to find each other in the long night.

SLIDING I guess the way I’d like to live is my daughter at the park: give  it everything I’ve got for an hour or so, and then when it’s time to go lay my head on the shoulder of someone big enough to carry me over the threshold and strap me in, gently. I’ll drift asleep, then,  knowing that when I wake up  I’ll be home         in time for lunch. 

INTRO TO THERAPY Since you ask, I guess my deepest fear is one day throwing off the covers to discover myself still under them,  asleep, and this was just the outer dream.  People say that nothing wakes you to life like facing death, and losing my wife or child would be my other pick.  Oh you just meant like sharks, or snakes? In that case, chalk me as a claustrophobic,  terribly afraid of being stuck.  

MORNING-TIME In footie pajamas, she picks a board book from the basket, brings it to me then looks up until I put her on my lap and start to tell about the brown bear or the white rabbit who tries to run from her mother.  Each page is ripe and full of color,  begging a slow ingestion, but I’ve just sipped the first word when she decides it’s time to flip the page. I try to slow her down, so I can.  It never works. Finished, she climbs down from her perch and swishes to her room to be dressed for the day in her big-girl clothes.

  A SACRAMENT A flicker every now and then  of…hmmm…let’s call it apprehension   of how far I am from beginning to touch the end of understanding things. Flicker implies flame,  which is the denotative name  of the element that briefly touches  down tonight on a front porch   in Tennessee, calling to life the collection of dead leaf  in my pipe bowl. The experience is much the same: an inhalation  of breath, a transformation, then this, which is a kind of dizziness as I know myself both as smoke and the fragrance drifting upwards.

  A SIMPLE THEOLOGICAL MISUNDERSTANDING I think I’ve misunderstood him  as something other than the guy not from around here, the one who walks into the bar,  throws back a Maker's Mark  and then says something cryptic like Blessed are the poor in spirit. And the poor in spirit present know not to ask too many questions—too  tired to do so anyway—so instead  they raise their pints and slide  back their stools to follow him in this unspoken invitation to spin  a while on the dance floor till they find what they’re after. 

  THIN SPACES At the blue house on Waterford Green, the one on the cul-de-sac between infancy and adulthood (which back then was 10,) I pushed aside the couch to define a thin space—two feet by four— that I could call "My Corner."  It was there I spent quiet hours, sitting at the plastic box that served as my desk, hoping to meet  the creative force needed to take sheets of cardboard and other trinkets and make of them something worth showing, like art, or a board game. Twenty years later  I push past dresses and too-many blazers  to again enter a thin space, this time  at the back of the upstairs closet.  There is a candle, a bowl and towel, and just enough room to kneel.  It’s here I'll continue to wait,  hoping still to meet  the creative force, the one  who will—I took the childish hope with me from Waterford Green— make me something.

SKIN AND BONES Diesel fuel, for starters,  and my margin for error now that I’m a father.  Apparently the atmosphere  has followed suit, convinced the suit accentuates her hips and now she needs to thin, again.  And all that I was certain in politely pushes back from the table, and as casually as able slips out and lets the faucet run. Is this what going home feels like, the acidic taste in the back of my throat,  another loss of something, and the hollow feeling  that follows? Bulimic world,  will you just keep something down?

SPIRITUS VERTIGINIS If everything is spinning, lay down.  Give up. Whether it’s you or the ground,  stumbling forward is a sure way to hit your head on a corner or even tumble overboard.  Lay still and quiet until you feel warm hands on either side of your face, holding your head steady, a voice telling you to relax your neck so they can maneuver the crystal back into the vacant space. This is what the doctor tells you, speaking in the quiet tenor  of someone who knows for certain:  something solid must enter the hollow organ. Accept the word, and don’t try to reason why—you’ll only start to spin again.

WHAT I'M TRYING TO GET MY HANDS AROUND The perfect pony is what’s left  after I’ve twisted, crimped, and snapped  her mop of toddler hair in wild  shapes even Pollock would be proud to make. Her mother laughs, knowing the absence I'm after, and weaving it together with dextrous fingers leaves me here to wonder: Maybe after enough poor poems the white space between the words will follow suit and say Okay, enough of this , and fed up at last will venture to another hand to twist them into what I’ve failed to pin. That day, what more               but to say again, Lord, there you are!