L.R. Harvey Poetry

ENCOURAGEMENT FOR THE DEAD None of this is going to work out. The boat will sink, or the boat will float another hundred years before  it sinks. The house will uncover a fix you can’t afford,  or maybe you fix the house and it affords you a dry place to fall apart, covered from the rain.  The garden will slowly be overrun  by rabbits when your fingers are too arthritic to pull the trigger of the pellet gun, or maybe you pull the trigger of the pellet gun and hit a rabbit who has a thousand rabbit relatives: the garden will be  overrun. Eventually,  with your consent or without it,  you’ll get up one night or in the morning and wander off  into the woods to see for yourself  where the sound of the waterfall is coming from. You’ll  leave the door open behind  you and the air conditioning  will slip out like a breath  between the ribs. So breathe easy, friend. You’re dead already.  You can never die. Fear not.

YESTERDAY Emerson and I share a string cheese on the 24th of April.  We’re in Chickamauga, Georgia, where we live. It’s a Monday.  I have a Pearsecco and she drinks  milk. We sit in the grass. A hawk  reminds us that the sky is bigger than we care to remember.  She plucks a buttercup and then another, drops  them in my open hands,  says something I can’t understand. Not much to see here,  all things considered. Yesterday they found  a toddler in a creek downtown,  facedown. We can’t see  much here to consider things. 

SERMON, BACK DOWN THE MOUNT And He spoke to them—He who knows the nose’s Lazarene ability to rouse the memory,  which is, He thinks, important for his dim  disciples to remember, who have, over time,  accrued on the way a certain stench  to which they are largely ignorant,  their noses perennially stuffed— He said to them, “forget the stuff about the hands and feet a minute.  Be instead the scent of me. Like a high- school fling’s perfume, bring with you to a room an uninvited  invitation to cast their memory to the other side,  to recollect a lover near-forgotten.  Might they sit up a little, suddenly taken  back to the riverwalk, say, or maybe  the drive in, where they snuck Rosé in water bottles and love was less abstract, flesh the evening feature. Might they be unable to wash it from their mind that night.  If they sit up, wonder where I am these days— yes, if they sit up, wonder who I am  these days, wonder who they ...

BLIND, KIND OF Mimi’s eyes were fine but she was blind.  The part of her mind, dad explained,  responsible for taking what she saw and seeing it. Genetic, we know now—traceable up the Coggshall line,  and likely, leaving South Carolina and crossing the Red Sea, running through Moses  even, (her son-in-law’s namesake,) who just once could see a bush for what it was.  Sometimes I ponder this, my inheritance.  Sometimes I wonder if my little daughter, at two— were I able to remove, like leather sandals, this skin inhibiting the view— would now be running round the living room  in a crackling ball of flame.  If this page, your hands, would do the same. 

THE JESUS PRAYER, KIND OF Lord Jesus Christ, son of God,  have mercy on me, a center of the tiny universe I’ve made and in which I’m here to offer  up this paper prayer to the God  I’ve crafted to inhabit it,  the one I've asked to stand in as dignitary to another word  I always mispronounce,  and in pronouncing, miss.

ARCHITECTURAL ANALYSIS Could you raise a temple here?  Or if it’s soft, plant a flower garden, or maybe dig a coy pond?  Coy ponds are nice in Autumn,  when a few leaves disguise themselves as fish, and lovers fish themselves into a kiss, disk-eyes each other, leave. If a coy pond is all this ground proves fit for, let he who turned his flesh to bread transform it, too, to fish.   Let him eye what's left of this soggy crust and carry it down, down, straight to the inner room.  

DOWN, DOWN Let's toss aside our fishy preoccupation with historicity. Let’s say they sunk him into text to type our slow descent to self, into an empty belly intent for Tarshish, which is a fancy way to say  really far away. His then is our slow  awakening that these, our lodgings,  are something less than satisfactory.  His our stomach-turn as such a place proves topsy-turvy in a tempest. His too our coming-to that no, we’re not  climbing out of this, that out  means down and down means jostled round the callused tongue of an immensity hungry to help us figure out ourselves, to help us  out ourselves into a meet figuring  that the only self with meat is the eaten one.

NEW PLACE That first week we noticed  every creak, like okay, this is the part where it all falls  apart and we leave here less one home . After an evening rain  I walked the backyard barefoot, assessing  each puddle to determine if it was evidence of pooling  which, given time, would undermine the structural integrity of what we had.  It didn’t last long, such sharp attunement. Soon the edges dulled and we were once again duped by habit into thinking we knew  this place as well as any  other we’d inhabited: the lent one  with the slow accumulation  of aches, the one we committed to construct together, forever, even the ancient one we inherited as infants, our grandfathers sprinkling  our heads like a first evening rain.