L.R. Harvey Poetry

LOOKING BACK Come the boardroom review at the end of first quarter there will be  an imbalance in the budget: payments  never received cause never paid,  or payments paid but mis-wired  to the wrong account. In most cases it doesn’t add up to an amount  meriting bankruptcy, window-shutter,  but it does serve to explain what remains  of the account manager’s time here: her penchant to scrap a penny or two  in unexpected investments, his odd routine  of drifting to sleep between perfectly  even sheets, and then that recurring dream  of some high-level exec whose face they can never see stooping over  to kiss their foreheads the way their parents never did, whispering go back to sleep sweetie, I’ll take it from here .

  THE PATRON SAINT OF CHICKAMAUGA MOWS MY YARD It’s true: stare long  enough and the icon’s  eyes begin to move,  back and forth like an anamorphic  chant at the temple  of the Toro Zero- Turn, offering up  the incense of  fresh-cut grass  and interceding  on your behalf as you venerate  him with a nod  and a glass of holy  water clinking with ice. 

NINE WEEKS OF EDEN Nine whole weeks of Eden  and not much has changed pre-fall  from the uterus. I still  teach middling lessons on  The Odyssey , winding my way  through a series of personal asides  like a button-downed bark  blown off-course of a lesson plan  until we scrape home soil with an audible sigh   at the sound of the bell.  Crab grass is still under the impression  that this is their garden,  and hell, based on the look of things they've got a claim. The Subaru has   stopped leaking oil, and while this might be read as an early sign  of a world-made-right, all the same it likely means I need  to fill it with oil, tonight.  But y esterday Eden spat up a chuckle,  lying on her back beneath Blue  Elephant dangling his trunk  like a ripe fruit. Not quite an echoing guffaw to shock the world into bloom, but it spread far enough  that I heard it from the other room,  ...

JUNKYARD GIRAFFE Off Georgia 193 he plants his hooves, likely salvaged from some puttering putt-putt place that rolled up its greens  when the board-walk economy went flat.  The way slow, perpetual presence  beneath a nest earns the flighty trust  of sparrows, his charges open their hoods to him, exposing their rust and fraying  belts, their welts and miscellaneous marks of decay, as if to say  “Sure, not much to look at now,  but you should’ve seen the way  I once took the turns,” which is what we all say as we're unloaded off the truck and given a plot. For his turn neither judgement nor praise,  this steady gaze, neck long as a  ladder, and on top a placid stare  all but promising that if you could  only shimmy up there you’d find the piece to get the whole thing running.

  BRIEF NOTES FROM A LONG WAR  If victory entails the sure elimination  of weeds, the battle’s already lost,  the city besieged. These roots run  deeper than the shoots reveal,  deeper even than the bottles claim  to combat, which even if you resorted to that  would wither you as well over the course of generations, its bile biting the hand (or the tender off-shoots of the hand) that sprayed it. If, however,  you define it as a bit more room  for what’s good to grow, than yes,  victory is complete and eternal, so long  as you sign off on being completely  willing to eternally return to the front  lines, snapping the hydra’d neck  of whatever head rears up from your soil  today, seeking to leech the nutrients  from the part of you where the flowers cluster in buds, awaiting the signal.

ST. THOMAS THE LOCAL At the intersection where Georgia 2  hits Old Lafayette Rd, trucks bearing  official insignia clog the asphalt esophagus mid-gulp. But as they spin it, the real foreign object is Thomas the Local  street-preacher, stuck in a storm  drain for over 24 hours beneath  the interstate before someone heard a voice.  Here, two stories intersect: In one, Thomas, too, heard voices singing  in the off-key chorus of his brain and followed oblivion into near-oblivion if not for the hoard of unsung blue-collar saviors scrapping  in the mud to save both the man beneath the freeway and their mortgage, some savings for their spouse to finish school.  In another, Thomas still heard the voices singing him down, down to the river, and dammit he'd almost made his way out through the narrow grate that escapes this linear-logical nonsense he'd spent his life raging against when the Empire did what they do, blocking not only his but our way th...

MOWING If when mowing the lawn you are self- propelled by visions of yourself  on the front porch, a glass of lemonade like a scepter in your hand as you gaze out over your kingdom at last laid low  and lined, read the reviews: this engine putters out before the work is through.  The grass is too good at what it does. It never tires. You do. But hey, if you’re ok with topping off, each weekend,  the emptying tank of your contentment,  as you were. But if this sounds something less  than what you once imagine living for,  there’s always the ol’ pivot, the shifting  of the frame, till whatever ground is gained becomes interior terrain. It’s an infinitely  bigger wildness to tend, but when  it’s not about finishing anymore  you can at last begin to worship at the temple of today, venerating  the local god whose ikon is the neighbor,  whose delight is sweat-stains  and the incense of fresh-cut grass  already rising, ...

GETTING BREAKFAST An admittedly precarious coop design,  where the chickens perch like white- hot half-domesticated dragons eyeing the sleepy village of my back  as I stoop below to swipe the gold  hoarded in the straw beneath them.   I built it this way because I fly  by—as the saying goes—the seat  of my pants, which is about how far  the chickens can wing it themselves  when they have the pluck, catching me  egg-handed in their hay-lined lair.  It would be a simple fix: jigsaw  a small hatch with hinges that open  from the outside, the eggs resting there for taking, all but swinging their legs like Humpty Dumpty and me no worse  for wear. I won't do it. Who am I to deny myself this daily  edging of the abyss, this fighting chance that for a brief and terrifying moment   I'll feel the claws in my back and enter again the shit-stained euphoria of being wildly, wildly alive.

DEALING WITH WORDS AND WINDOWS                          — "alluding to the whole in the wall" — James Joyce from  Finnegan's Wake   As any builder knows, trailer ratcheted down with whitewood studs, nouns, and various connective bric-a-brac in the hardware bag, if the intent is to peer in you’ll first have to frame it  out. This eclipses, of course,   the view you were imagining   looking into, but on this side of the hinges, incongruous  as it is, there has to be a wall if you're hoping for a hole in it.