L.R. Harvey Poetry

THE ROAD BACK Even the dog can sense the difference,  drops back his ears and sniffs the air as we turn onto the street that takes us home. Asleep in the back seat and dozens of turns later, it’s this one that wakes a wordless expectation.  I don’t know how or why, but know  what it is to close my eyes until a slow  pull—different from the others— wakes me with a whimper. We’re getting closer. 

FINDING HOME The orientation of the house was difficult  to discern from such a small sampling of pictures, but there was something about it that made us sign the dotted line  without a second glance at interest rates or all we'd leave. When we move in  we’re bound to uncover high rates of misunderstanding, like what we imagined the back door is actually the front,  and the windows let in much more light than photos could convey, but we’ll confront our ignorance down the road. Right  now, let’s celebrate that we’re under contract on the home of our dreams, the one  that— this, at least, was clear—boasts a living room where there is space for everyone.

THE RECEIVER Not much can tune her hair  these days, so we aim it upwards like antenna. Wound tight and tilted,  they orbit the house like a satellite searching for a signal, and ad hoc  as they are they seem to work,  because some days, somewhere between her cooking on the kitchen set and reading a book upside down, I pick up  a transmission. It suddenly cuts  in, faint and with plenty of static but just clear enough to catch snippets of a song I can never name but know I’ve heard before. And then it goes as quickly as it came, and I’m left again with the silence to marvel at how now and then  these local receptors can intercept  a frequency from somewhere behind the stars. 

The Truman Show True man, I know you keep your secret hope— the one that there’s a bubble sure to pop one day, and all the glints and glimmers sprinkle on your palm like dew on a well- manicured lawn—locked in your chest deep in the basement. You knows it’s a fragile thing, liable to snap  like a ship’s mast if you bring it up  from the dark for one more person  to tell you, consolingly , to keep it light. Sometimes at night you stay awake,  piecing together ripped fragments of a face  you can neither see nor forget,  the one which will sail you to the edge of the world, become a door, and pull you into obscurity. No more false fathers. This is love, and out here the real thing will hit you like a bus.

THE BACK DOOR If one day you wake up to find your faith slipped out sometime during the night without even the decency of goodbye, and try as you might you can’t love God, you might try accepting that and spend it on children instead.  There’s a neighbor who says  she could use a dash of salt,  and a creepy man who sleeps outside, and a freshman in a college dorm,  and plenty of relatives. Look down to discover the excess on your hands now that you've stopped holding a lie, and then look down again to see the excess of fleshy hands that desperately need holding. Why waste  all that love looking up? And hey, one day you might find the whole issue a big misunderstanding, and it all boils down to the fact that God just looked different than you were taught to expect, and you were doing it all along, good and faithful servant.

BILINGUAL FUNERAL The service began in a language we knew,  followed by—as we knew well enough to expect—a pause, as the translator  looked for words for those in the church  who didn’t understand. At first they understood, and then the pause lengthened, and we began to fidget a bit in secondhand embarrassment.  And then the pause lengthened,  and some of us looked around  to reassure ourselves we weren’t alone  in our unspoken suspicion  that the one who claimed to know didn’t. And then the pause drew  itself out all the way to the end of our time. We shuffled out then in the long silence, to this day waiting to find out what it meant.