L.R. Harvey Poetry

ANOTHER LAST TIME If you're blessed with one, and choose to stick around  long enough pay the slow unfolding its due regard,  to watch a child grow  is to undergo a million little deaths, gentle as a daisy daggered in your back  or a blade of grass drawn deftly across the jugular,  a wound so delicate you question  whether you’re being  a bit melodramatic  about the whole thing, until one morning they’re  not so little anymore  and you experience the big  death, the one where you die to your long-held notion that you have somewhat of an idea of how the world works. Don't worry, though— the dead are those who know there’s always more dying  to do, which is what the children were sent here to show you, ushering you along the backwards way to the gates of the deathless city.

CAUSE-EFFECT I can’t find the dominoes,  but if you’re enamored with the science of how this here can topple even that  all the way over there,  take this flashlight and go  at night into the slash of woods  behind the house. In the beam of battery-operated illumination  the monsters show themselves  as the shadows of a doubt cast by an oak tree in moonlight. Having  tipped them (with the fear they usher) over, next to fall is the wilderness  they used to inhabit, or what was left  of it. And since you now know  what’s out there, wonder plinks down  with a little click, and then, at last, worship, which is all you had to offer the one able to fend off the monsters which kept to the wilderness in the slash of woods behind the house, the presence you could never quite put a finger on but which flickered round the others like the lightning bugs  who only show themselves  when it’s dark enough to see.

SHEDS, CHICKEN COOPS, GREENHOUSES Considering that rain, wind, time, and various other elements are sure to warp, and even—at the last— level any feeble structures we erect to shelter our many loves, consider these thoughts, too, provisional. Still, considering that we must raise them nonetheless to provide some semblance of order out there, and seeing as we might as well share what's worked, at least until it doesn't, here are a few, small fragments I've gathered like scrapped pallets behind the Farm Supply for the few, small shelters I’ve managed—with plenty of shims and caulk—to get off the ground:

INCREASINGLY CRANKY Easy enough to wither— just give it time, and nature.   But to ripen into a fruitful crank is work: not to chafe against work or the world, the people who make them  up, but to adore them  more than most and as they ought to be, so much more so  that when they’re anything less you know the very best that you can do  is make it clear—using words when necessary–you’re not happy about it.

  STEPPING STONES “my songs in the house of my pilgrimage” — Psalm 119:54 The floor—as I’m sure we’re all  aware—is lava. I needn’t tell  you, then, that getting from here to there will require  an extra dose of creativity from  those of us yet exiled in the living room,  will necessitate we make  unexpected combinations of the resources available. Ours is a bric-a-brac  path we craft one tip-toe at a time, balancing on what we know while reaching for what we don’t,  thus picking our careful way across the floor-plan of our sojourn   to the narrow hall which leads to the high ground of the king bed. 

SUPPORT ROLE Mostly to applaud. That, and dance  beneath the stage, dark faces  indefinable. Put another way,  we’re here to make the play  on the off chance the ball rolls  to us, but mainly to play defense and get it in the scorer’s hands.  By all means, aspire to be in the band or draw the scouts—that’s not  what I’m on about. It’s just that even the big lights flicker and turn out  to be pretty small to scale when it’s dark enough to see the stars again.  And then, never underestimate  how nice it is to slip out  on the porch and have a smoke  while nobody cares, how your breath floats up  to join something equally invisible, or at least far beyond your sight.